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Killer Rats Cake |
by Barbara Jo
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Barbara May and I were concerned that The Killer Rats Cake might not be sufficient to feed all our guests, which is exactly the opposite of the problem that we usually have with my cakes. As it turned out, we needn't have worried (we had two whole rats left at the end of the party) but to guard against the possibility of insufficient cake we decided to make supplemental cupcakes. Barbara May came up with the brilliant idea of making them monster cupcakes, covered in fur, with googly eyes.
Several days in advance Barbara May piped a selection of royal icing eyes onto wax paper with lots of different expressions - angry eyes, sad eyes, scary eyes, surprised eyes . . . Once they were dry she painted in little black food coloring irises.
While she was making the red velvet cakes for me to carve into rat bodies she also made several dozen red velvet cupcakes and iced them with the cream cheese icing that traditionally accompanies red velvet cake.
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While I was making spun sugar for the rat fur and the arm hair I also made fur for all of the cupcakes, just scooping up a wad of spun sugar and plopping it atop each cupcake. Have you gathered yet that there was a lot of spun sugar involved in this entire operation? Barbara May and I did our best to clean it all off of the kitchen floor, walls, cabinets, etc., not to mention our shoes, but it wouldn't surprise me if she were still finding ants embedded in elusive deposits of sugar in various corners of her kitchen. And you should have seen the weird looking mess when we put our shoes outside on the porch because they were too sticky to leave in the house and the sugar on the soles melted in the heat into gooey, sticky puddles!
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Anyway, once the cupcakes all had fur I sprayed them various bright colors with my airbrush and turned them back over to Barbara May to stick eyes on to. Interestingly, many of the cupcakes had entirely different facial expressions depending on the side from which they were viewed. Some seemed angry from one angle, but worried from another angle or alarmed from on side, but sad from the other. And they all looked like the bastard children of Muppets and those aliens from Critters.
All in all, they were delicious, cute, and incredibly sticky to eat. Clearly a winning combination!