Happy Natal Equinox!

Yesterday was MiniM.E.'s natal equinox.  It was a pretty exciting day for her.  So I bought her a cake.  Let's be honest.  I bought me a cake.  Any excuse to eat cake...

I wanted to have the store write "Happy Natal Equinox" on the cake, but as it was, the decorations were far from fabulous and I wasn't going to risk them ruining my $13 cake.  (Really? $13 for a CAKE? I could make 13 cakes for $13.  The price you pay for convenience... and tasty frosting)  So I bought some pink gel icing.  NOT the easiest thing to write on a cake with, but it did the job.

I was pretty upset because as it turns out, she wasn't even feeling well and seemed to have a tummy ache.  I didn't want to mess with whatever stomach bug she might have by feeding it sugar, so she didn't even get to eat any Natal Equinox cake.

To make up for it, I let her drive the car.  Seems like a fair trade off.

Cake Wars: Me vs. Me... In my kitchen!

I love Food Network Challenge where they have to make crazy cakes.  Every time I watch it I'm convinced I should probably be on it.  Mostly because I have close to zero cake decorating experience and have made all of two (now three) decorative cakes in my baking career.  Yet I still feel, that despite never having even seen a piece of fondant, that I could be a strong competitor.

While in Dresden, I made two fancy-schmancy cakes.  One was an alligator for our friend Casey's birthday, and another was "commissioned" after the cake was displayed at a party, for another friend's daughter's birthday.

Click here to see the first cake, an awesome alligator.  Here to see the second cake- a frog prince.

After the first cake a year ago, I was asked to create a dragon cake for a friend's birthday.  He's Welsh, and the Welsh flag looks like this:

Unfortunately, when I agreed upon making the cake, I didn't even know I'd have a baby yet!  Needless to say, making fancy-schmancy cakes is a time-consuming process.  With a small baby, I would have needed approximately 1 year, 4 weeks and 3 days to complete a dragon cake.  So, I had to call in the reinforcements.  Thanks Mom!!

Due to my incredible cake-decorating expertise, I only had to redo the entire carved part of the cake once, and the wings twice, but other than that, things went smoothly (though as always, took about 14 times longer than originally anticipated).

Here is the fancy-schmancy dragon cake.

I also made cutsy-wootsy dragon cake pops.

See, told you I should be on Food Network!  Also judging by the quality of photo #1, I should not enter photo contests... Though I am starting to work on the quality of photos (see photo #2)  but can only manage to bang out one good photo a session...