Birthday Cake Fail 2012

Last year, I proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that I will never make a living as a cake artisan. Not only did LO's very first birthday cake look like this:

it also made the child vomit. (Actually, he had a little stomach bug, but who's going to quibble with details when the child took one bite of delicious cakey goodness and then decided to throw it back up again.)

Despite the fact that I am not now, nor have I ever been either Martha Stewart or Duff Goldman (or even Betty Crocker), I found myself once again dreaming of magical cake creations as we drew closer to LO's second birthday. Specifically, I wanted to make a dinosaur cake, since LO's birthday party invitation had a dinosaur on it. A quick search online led me to this work of art, which I fooled myself into thinking was within my cake decorating abilities:

Photo courtesy of dinopit.com

Either because I'm more self-aware of my crafting shortcomings than I think I am, or because I wanted multiple opportunities to eat cake, I decided to make a practice dinosaur cake this past weekend so that I would not feel stressed about the real cake for the party. And so this is the story of a delicious cake fail:

 So far, so good.

All right. So it looks more like a cake version of a Volkswagen Beetle. At this point I convinced myself that icing could cover a multitude of sins.

Like these.

I think this was the moment when I realized I was not going to be able to create anything remotely resembling the original cake. This was also when I realized I probably didn't have enough icing and I definitely didn't have enough blue food coloring. You'll notice the tail is a lighter blue than the rest of the cake.

Thankfully, adding candy stegosaurus ridges infinitely improved the look of the cake. Because it otherwise looked like an over-frosted pile of cakes.

If I knew how to leave well enough alone, I would have stopped here. Because I don't, I decided to add a smile:

Which is how we ended up with Dino McMurderousButDelicious, who is still quite bloodthirsty after the stroke left half his face paralyzed. (You'll also notice that the tail is only partially iced, because apparently two entire tubs of icing are not nearly enough.)

And of course, the only way to serve up a sinister blue dino cake is with a meat cleaver. Luckily, our guests who came to help us consume the cake and wish LO a happy early birthday didn't seem to mind.

Most importantly, this guy kept it down:

Next year, when I start talking about making a pirate ship cake with working cannons, please knock some sense into me.