Birthday cakes: how big can we go?
(Originally published March 2023)
Several years ago, I started making birthday cakes for my grandson and his baby sister. Soon Mark joined in, and things escalated.
We have gradually turned what used to be a twice-yearly afternoon of baking and decorating into a days-long endeavor with all the effort and expense of building a Mardi Gras float.
We end up sleep deprived and covered in powdered sugar, but to the grandchildren’s delight, we deliver elaborate cakes—tableaus, really—on their chosen themes. And what our cakes lack in refined elegance, they make up for in color, size, and over-the-top decorations.
The keys to building an amazing-looking birthday cake, I have discovered, are fondant and food coloring. Fondant is an edible if unappetizing cross between marshmallow and modeling clay. It can be rolled out or molded into various shapes and colored so vividly that party guests will develop ADHD by just looking at it too long. (As a bonus, once the candles are blown out, you can peel off the fondant layer to reveal a less-alarming buttercream-frosted cake underneath.)
I blame Mark in part for our habit of making increasingly complex cakes. When it was just me, I kept it basic, limiting myself to a single 50-pound bag of confectioners’ sugar and a mortgage payment’s worth of cake decorating tools, pans, sprinkles, and figurines ranging from dinosaurs to Frozen characters. But his perfectionism and builder’s eye combined with my creative side, and together we have turned into cake-baking maniacs.
“The cake itself was dry and bland.”
This past December, we made our grandson a rainforest cake the size of a coffee table. On a curvy plywood base, we set two fondant-covered cakes of different heights, connected by a real rope bridge.
The scene featured a waterfall (non-working, much to Mark’s chagrin). Sloths and snakes and tigers and monkeys peeked out from behind palm trees and other greenery. Rocks and flowers lined the blue fondant river.
The cake itself was dry and bland. But it’s not about the cake anymore.
To lighten the workload, we commandeer visiting family members or anyone else who wanders by and force them to help us. For example, the UPS delivery guy (who has changed routes for some reason) gets full credit for the jellybean stone path that led to the rainforest lagoon.
For her fifth birthday last weekend, our granddaughter requested a cake depicting the Paw Patrol tower, something neither of us were familiar with.
A week before the party, I printed out Google images of the tower, and Mark and I sat down for the design huddle. We had our standard disagreement over the shear strength of cake and the laws of physics, both of which Mark thinks I made up to hinder his artistic vision. I held firm until he agreed, grumbling, to work within the bounds of reality.
After three evenings in his wood shop, he dragged in a two-foot-tall, three-sided, tapered wooden tower with a platform on top, on which I would place the cake “lookout.” The tower weighed more than the birthday girl and took me a full day to paint.
After Mark’s impressive construction, my clumsy fondant-covered cake was a bit of a letdown. It looked less like a glass-walled building with peaked red roof and more like a lumpy blue-and-red yurt.
“The tower weighed more than the birthday girl and took me a full day to paint.”
But I made up for it with the cartoonish yellow telescope that jutted out of the roof. I sculpted it out of Rice Krispie treats and—of course—wrapped it in canary yellow fondant.
Overall, our granddaughter was thrilled with the tower. She grimaced a bit at the cake part but didn’t say anything, probably only because she doesn’t know the word for “yurt.” And once the cake was removed, she wasted no time in populating the tower with her Paw Patrol toys.
Mark and I went home and took naps.
We have nine months until our grandson’s eighth birthday, but if we’re going to keep outdoing ourselves, we can’t get lazy. In fact, Mark has already started milling out the lumber for the occasion; this project is going to be a real showstopper.
For my part, I’m stocking up on powdered sugar and food coloring. You would not believe how much fondant it takes to cover a 10-by-14-foot tiny house.
