Cake Wreck

So I told you Birdy's birthday cake deserved a post of its own!  SOO many things went wrong with this cake!  I searched the internets for a great idea for a Rapunzel tower cake and came up with a basic design using cupcakes stacked on a dowel a la Food Network Challenge and a chocolate-covered ice cream cone as the tower top. Easy enough. 

I baked the cakes Friday night, and M and I decorated for the party and I finished up the braid craft on Friday as well.  Saturday morning was our Stake Women's Relief Society conference, so I knew I'd be gone all morning until about 1, so I wanted to leave plenty of time to decorate the cake (and only have to do the cake).  So far so good. 

I decided to try out a new frosting recipe from Pintrest- it was a fail and WAAAYY too thin to decorate with. No panic, though, since my PR training taught me to anticipate a crisis, and I had a plan to dispatch DMP to Walmart to buy frosting from their bakery in the event of frosting failure.  So off he went and I got a call a short time later telling me that they don't sell their frosting and neither does Albertsons anymore.  Sweet.  The frosting aisle DID have Wilton brand butter cream frosting in a can, so I thought that would be great for the kind of decorating I had in mind. 

He brought the frosting home and I started coloring it.  I got some cool new gel colors that come in little squeeze bottles- it came out really, really fast.  No worries, we'd just have VERY green grass and a VERY purple tower!  I got the round cake frosted and the tower assembled and mostly frosted when I licked a little bit of frosting from my finger. I wish I had words to describe the taste. I guess I'll borrow some from Tangled :)  - At first it just tasted like powdered sugar.  Then it tasted like bad man smell, then it tasted like REALLY bad man smell, and then there was an aftertaste of burnt plastic and it all finished off with the taste of dirt (or perhaps the taste of the color brown?).  Seriously.  Two of the Moms who came to the party tasted it and they said "Oh, it isn't that bad... Oh, Oh yuck!". 

So, once we discovered the evil after taste of the frosting, I had visions of 13 little girls pushing their cake away in disgust and decided it had to go.  Luckily, I had a can of blue canned frosting in my stash, and ta da! Yellow and blue make green!  I left the tower with the yucky purple stuff, thinking that no one would eat it and scraped as much of the yucky green off and re-frosted with the new, less yucky frosting. 

I finished building my cupcake tower on my dowel and discovered that my carefully-measured cupcake tower was too short for the dowel.  The cupcakes were already threaded on to it and frosted, so we couldn't easily dismantle it and re-cut.  No problem- DMP came up with the idea to cut the top of the ice cream cone off and we'd stick a little flag on the end sticking out (what are we at- 6? 7? cake-related disasters?).  At this point we noticed that the tower was leaning. A lot. It was only getting worse.  By this time it was 2:45 (the party was at 3:30) so we decided to admit defeat and go buy a cake and stick both little Rapunzel dolls on it and call it a day.  But first, we had to take a picture of our wreck with my sad face (above).

It was just as well we admitted defeat- just as we were documenting the wreck, the tower decided once and for all to give up and it fell PLOP onto the table.  What you see there is the face of a hysterical Mom who has been struggling with a cake for almost 2 hours only to have it end in spectacular failure (although, we decided Bear's monster cake was a bigger wreck, since it actually fell completely apart...).  Also, I was realizing all the work that still had to be done before the guests arrived in just 30 min. 

DMP saved the day with a cake/cupcake from Sam's and the girls were still thrilled and fun was had by all. As my Mom pointed out- I'm now at 2 fail and 1 success for cakes this year (she's always so encouraging!).  I've learned my lesson- on the years that we are throwing a party, I'm going to buy the cake and not stress about it. I'll do a "Mom cake" on the years when we have a more low-key family party.  The failures are bound to be slightly less spectacular that way.