A Lazy Mom Makes Her Very First Cake

It's true. I'm pretty lazy. I've never made a cake before.

Madelynn's birthday party is on Saturday, so Jeffrey and I decided that we should make a cake (to avoid buying a cake-saster from Walmart) all alone, by ourselves. He's never made a cake either. Ever.

I could have bought out the cake-aisle at Micheal's, they had some fabulous tools and awesome rolling pins, but it was all so expensive. So we went the lazy/cheap route, and used things that we had laying around the house... which wasn't much.

So we'll start at the beginning. This is the life of my first cake ever (an important cake, at that!)

See those baby fingers in the bottom corner? They look helpful, right? They aren't. We don't have a mixer, so we had to mix the cake by hand. It took longer than the recommended two minutes and thirty seconds with a mixer. A lot longer.

My cake was lop-sided. I tried to even it out by making a little cake pile of scraps in the corner. Apparently they sell some kind of cake-leveling cutting thinger, but that was like, a 40 dollar tool! No way. I trimmed it with a steak knife. That's a frozen pizza box, by the way.

Cutting shapes. We used a wine glass for the big dots, the cap to the cooking spray for the medium dots, half of a plastic Easter egg for the small dots, and a highlighter cap for the tiny ones. Screw cookie cutters. (Don't worry, I wiped the baby drool and cat hair off of everything first. Seriously.)

I have a bakers'-blister from rolling out the fondant. I'm not kidding. I rolled and rolled and rolled and rolled. Forever.
We cut the edges off with a pizza cutter. It was clean.

This is the bottom tier. We cut the flowers out with a block from Madelynn's little shape-sorter thingy. I cut the letters out with a butter knife. A serrated butter knife. All the sharp ones were in the dishwasher.

And the top. It's x1 because Mads is "Mads times one"... right? Get it? Actually, I couldn't figure out what to put in that blank space and it totally bothered me the entire time. A flower didn't look right, stripes-no, polka dots-no, and then bam! total light bulb moment. Mady x 1. Because she's ONE!! That totally makes sense. Err, well it did at the time...

The aftermath (and a nice look at how inventive Jeffrey and I are. Q-Tips? C'mon, that's brilliant... and free).

I love it. It's cracked, the colors are running, and Mady's name looks like it was cut with a butter-knife. That's my favorite part! I just can't figure out why it looks so shiny. It's pretty shiny, right?

So yeah, I'm satisfied with it now, but what happens when we put the top cake on the bottom cake? Will it fall through? Sinking-cake-syndrome? And how exactly do we put the top cake on? Like, how do we get it off the pizza box and onto the cake?? I'm worried. Really worried.

I'm thinking that we should run out and buy a back-up cake. Just in case.