Daddy’s Birthday Cake

The day after I delivered all those music cookie boxes and volunteered at the music festival all day was my husband’s birthday. Not only was there his cake to make, but I also had to bake cakes for the class I was teaching the next day at my daughter’s school. Therefore I was entirely happy to let Peo take the lead on Corran’s birthday cake!

She requested that I make a spherical cake with the Wilton sports ball pan (which I’ve never used to make a sports ball but have used for many other things like Shelob, a fossilized skull, an eyeball, multiple turkeys (which will be taught in Austin on November 20, 2011, stay tuned for details), and more). She said she wanted to do a globe cake for Daddy, modelled after her ball globe. I quipped that Daddy’s an Australian and they like to think of the typically represented globe as being upside down, so she decided to do the globe the Aussie way, with Australia on top. She requested green icing for the land masses and blue for the water. Then she said she’d need some orange for, as she put it, “The Ring of Fire around New Zealand.” Okay…

So I baked the cakes and levelled them, which left two smaller dome-shaped castoffs. I let her use those to practice some decorating:

Peo pipes icing on the practice cakes with the globe model in the background.

She asked me to place the continents for her so I winged that as quickly as I could (complete with some stars pulled higher to be mountains, as Peo requested) and then let her go to town with the water. She started off small at the bottom, but by the top declared there to be multiple incoming tsunamis (I am not making this up) that she said “might kill all the people in the world and then there’d be hardly anybody left!” I think someone has been reading too much Wikipedia or something…

Then she added the Ring of Fire and voila: Daddy’s Birthday Cake of Potential Cataclysmic Doom:

Antarctica-On-Top globe with the Ring of Fire over New Zealand and Australia.

She was quite insistent that we “leave the equator blank so everybody can see that that’s where the equator is in case they don’t know and then the cake will show them.”

A chocolate buttercream filling shows through as the equator behind South America.

Then we stuck a candle in Antarctica, which probably won’t help with the whole decreasing ice-sheets thing. But this version of the Earth is quite doomed anyway.

Hope I didn't flatten any penguins with that.

Daddy was summoned, “Happy Birthday” was sung, the planet was destroyed:

Corran was quite pleased that the Earth was the "right way up" and charmingly unfazed by his daughter's violent narrative. That's because he's met her and knows it's normal.

Evidence consumed with what would be a disturbing amount of glee if I wasn’t already so familiar with the wee Destructor too:

NOM NOM teehee NOM

UPDATE: There is now a video of Peo explaining her cake.