Our first-born son loves building. To say he gets excited when he sees a new road being built is an understatement and he gets ecstatic when we get to drive on a fresh smooth new road. So he requested a ‘new road’ cake for his 5th birthday this year. I wasn’t sure exactly how I’d do this but I knew I’d figure it out somehow. The end result came pretty close to the picture I had created in my mind, albeit a few minor differences and without the gleam of perfection. So I made a 13×9 cake using this basic yellow cake recipe I had in my files. It seemed a bit too creamy going in but I figured it would harden a bit after baking. After letting it cool for a while and letting it sit turned upside down on a cooling rack with a towel draped over, I figured it would slide out nicely.
Errr–wrong. 🙁 So it came out in 2 main pieces, with a few other chunks and crumbs that I ate to make myself feel better. Surprisingly I actually didn’t stress too much over this apparent disaster. So I just trimmed it to make the pieces even and wrapped them up in foil, stuck them in the freezer and went to bed.
The next day, I spread a light layer of frosting leftover from the 2 year old’s space shuttle cake 10 days earlier. I used the frosting like a glue to try and get the two pieces to stick together and then put it back in the freezer while I made the chocolate frosting. Once this was done I proceeded to spread on the chocolate frosting and then I got the corner where there was a big missing piece of cake. We had bought some oreos earlier in the day because I’d had a sudden inspiration so I used the chocolate frosting and some of the larger broken up pieces and stuck oreos on to fill in the hole….
Then I finished frosting and smoothing it and stuck on the digger and loading truck I’d bought at the cake store. Then I came to the ‘new road’ part which is where all my imaginative energy left me. So I just dabbed on a thicker slab of chocolate frosting and found some random yellow sprinkles in my cake decorating stash. (later that night I realized I could have used a piece of one of their toy roads here but oh well, it worked out like this).
Most importantly, our son was very pleased, to say it mildly, with his ‘new road’ cake. 🙂
way to go mama! his face says it all.