For my daughter's eleventh birthday, she decided (after many, many changes of mind) on a backwards birthday theme. There were some good ideas floating around the interweb tubes:
Eat under the table! Eat dessert first! Hang droopy balloons from the ceiling and put the streamers on the floor! Then I struck idea gold: meatloaf cupcakes with mashed potato icing. Brilliant! I'll make dinner look like dessert, and dessert look like dinner.
Since the birthday girl didn't want meatloaf, we decided on macaroni & cheese, in a casserole dish, frosted with mashed potatoes, to look like a cake. Then, I searched for cakes that resembled food and found one I believed myself capable of: a pot of mac & cheese. The baker didn't provide much instruction, but it appeared to be a couple of layered round cakes frosted with gray icing, and licorice handles (very nice touch). The top was scooped out a bit to form the lip of the pot, then had the orange noodles piped onto it. I could totally do that. I was pretty sure, anyway.
I've made cakes before, but I never make birthday cakes. I knew it wouldn't be too difficult to make this cake, but step one was to bake round cakes, and I do not own round cake pans. I only recently acquired a muffin tin (thanks, Mom). Step two was to layer the round cakes and frost them with gray icing, but my good friend who loves cake decorating warned me how difficult gray icing is to make. To sidestep these hurdles, I decided to bake the cake in a glass bowl, which I already owned, and could then use any color frosting. Great! So simple!
The tragedy here is that it was simple. So, so easy...except that I realized I don't know how to smooth out icing. The bowl looked terrible, and every attempt I made at smoothing it just shaved more frosting off and left ragged edges. I did what I could to minimize it, but it was still rough-looking. The noodles, on the other hand, turned out wonderfully. In fact, the cake did actually fool a couple of guests who thought the food was in a stoneware bowl. An ancient, handmade stoneware bowl, maybe. They were probably just trying to make me feel better.
Of course, the important thing here is that everyone loved the concept, and the cake tasted great (it was still cake, after all). I still think the cake belongs on Cake Wrecks, except that I am not a professional cake decorator.
This would belong on Cake Wrecks, too, if it were a real cake. It should be noted that it is difficult to write from a ketchup bottle. Also, a completely unrelated bit of advice: if ever faced with the option, don't put birthday candles into a still-warm casserole. That said, I have no idea how those wax bits ended up in the mashed potatoes.
