Holiday Candy 2013

Fruit Ninja Cake

I’m so happy that now that I’m back in California I can make birthday cakes for my little friend Isaac again!  He really loves the game Fruit Ninja and he really loves numbers, so I went for a Fruit Ninja cake that prominently featured the number seven.  At one point I had planned to make the base shaped like four number sevens, but fortunately Isaac’s mom pointed out that my sketch looked disturbingly like a swastika, so I shaped it like six number sevens instead.  Cakewreck narrowly avoided!

Isaac was celebrating at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, so I had to make a cake small and portable enough that it could survive the hour drive over windy roads and conveniently be served in the middle of a busy amusement park.  By my standards, then, this cake was remarkably practical.  The only problem was that it was too windy to light the candles.

Basically, the number seven is a wooden cut-out covered with fondant to look like the background of Fruit Ninja.  The slashes that are cutting the fruit are poured isomalt.  All the little fruits are cake covered with modeling chocolate.  I started with a basic white cake recipe and then added fresh squeezed fruit juices and zests so that each cake is flavored like the appropriate fruit.  The lime, orange, and pineapple worked especially well.  It turns out to be pretty hard to get kiwi flavor and watermelon flavor to translate into cake.  For the bombs, I added a little bit of Tabasco sauce.  I think they had a little bite at the end, but I didn’t want them to be too powerful since kids would be eating them.

Pearl Forrester cross stitch

I just finished my first-ever cross stitch!  I think it turned out rather well.

Now to tweet it at Mary Jo Pehl! 

Update:  She answered me!  Squee!

Minion Chicken Coop Cake

While my mom and I were taking a cake class at the Wilton School, we had a very nice Skype call with my niece and nephew.  They told us that they were planning to be minions from Despicable Me for Halloween.  We also had a very entertaining conversation about whether or not they were building me a chicken coop.  The details of the chicken coop joke are kind of hard to explain, but basically I decided to take the joke to the next level. 

So I made the cake I was making for class a minion / chicken coop cake.  Then I carried it back home on the plane.  It was greeted with shrieks of joy.

Dinosaur Skeleton Cake

This is a cake that I made for a class at the Wilton School on tiered cakes and buttercream. I don’t do many buttercream cakes or many traditional tiered cakes, so I’m pretty pleased with the results. It’s not as impressive as many of my cakes, but I think it’s still pretty fun.

Extreme Stringwork

Mom and I took an Extreme Stringwork class.

More candy

Candy molds

I got new candy molds!

Woyzeck

I was the production designer for a production of Woyzeck at the University of Wisconsin - Madison’s University Theatre. The title characters eats nothing but peas, so the director, Kristin Hunt, and I created a pea-flavored tasting menu that we served to the audience over the course of the play.

The tasting menu began with a single pea and included pea flavored gum, pea flavored soda, and pea flavored jello. At the end of the play, the corpse of Woyzeck’s murdered lover Marie was lowered from the ceiling. The corpse was made of styrofoam, but I used fondant to decorate it as I would a cake. The open chest cavity was full of pea-flavored cake balls. As the audience filed out of the theater, they were invited to take a cake ball from the corpse.

Star Wars cake

For her seventh birthday, Alex had very specific cake specifications.  She wanted a cake being cut in half by a light saber with “Jedi trainers” around the sides. The only Jedi trainers she could specifically name were Yoda and Obi-Wan, which isn’t surprising, because she’s only seen Episodes IV, V, and VI. So I found a picture of the Jedi Council and went with that.

The light saber is a combination of poured sugar and pressed sugar with a string of LEDs embedded in it. The handle of the light saber is gum paste.  The Jedi trainers are also gum paste, hand painted with food coloring. I’m particularly pleased with the candle light sabers.

Head Chopping Cake

When I asked Sam what cake he wanted for his fourth birthday, of course he wanted an Axe Cop cake like his sister had.  I didn’t have time to make Sam quite as large a cake as I made for Alex, so I just went with a simple 8” round cake with a row of bad guys around the perimeter.

I stuck a motor in the middle, so that I could attach chocolate axes to chop the bad guys’ heads off.  I really needed a stronger motor and a better way to attach the chocolate axes, but we did eventually manage to decapitate and/or knock over all the gum paste bad guys.

Sugar Dome

I’m back on Food Network, on the Sugar Dome episode “When Toy Stores Come to Life at Night!”

Halloween Wars!

Check it out - I'm a warrior of Halloween Wars!  You can watch my TV debut on Food Network, October 7th at 9:00 Eastern and Pacific.

UPDATE: Here are the pieces we made.

Eyeball Cordial Cherries

One of my personal favorite candy inventions. They squish just like a real eyeball (maybe?) when you bite into them and they taste delicious! The color of the iris distinguishes between the brandy-soaked and non-brandy soaked varieties.

Carousel Cake

My grandmother lives near a beautiful old carousel from the 1920s.  When we visited her when were little, she would always take us to ride it.  When I was designing her 90th birthday cake, I got to thinking about riding the carousel with her, and this is the result.

Obviously, it rotated and lit up.  The little gum paste horses on the candles are modeled after horses on the real carousel.

Axe Cop Cake

For my niece's sixth birthday we decided on an Axe Cop theme. Axe Cop’s favorite food is birthday cake with a candle of himself on it, so I took that as my starting place for the cake.

The cake is lemon-flavored, so it's Axe Cop - with lemon!  (If that doesn't make any sense to you - read this.)

The cake topper is gum paste with axe candles in his hands. The gum paste comic panels around the sides are all of Axe Cop’s team members with their catch phrases. The gum paste heads are bad guys’ heads that Axe Cop has chopped off.

Axe Cop also has a robot that lives in his moustache and hands him weapons at need.  So I made robot arms holding a chocolate axe and concealed them inside the cake.  Right before we served the cake, Alex flipped the switch and the arm smashed dramatically out of the cake.  Sadly, the chocolate axe broke on the way out, but I had a spare on hand for the photo op.

Zebra Cupcakes

When I asked my nephew Sam what he wanted for his third birthday cake, he immediately responded, “Zebra cupcake!” I have no idea where he got this idea, or what exactly he thinks a zebra cupcake looks like. To my knowledge, he has never seen anything that could reasonably be called a zebra cupcake. I tried to encourage him to elaborate on the idea of a zebra cupcake, but he wasn’t very forthcoming.  So I was left to interpret his request as best I could.

I don’t quite recall my thought process, but I ultimately decided to make zebras riding a big ferris wheel with a lion jumping up to try to get them.  Mostly, I probably just wanted to see if I could make a ferris wheel. Initially, I had considered making the ferris wheel motorized, but after consulting Sam’s mom and his big sister, Alex, I decided that Sam would like it more if he could operate the ferris wheel himself with a hand crank. Based on the usual size of cupcakes, I calculated that, in order to accommodate the sixteen cupcake cars that I planned to make, the ferris wheel would need to be about two feet in diameter.

I was at a little bit of a disadvantage in building the ferris wheel because I was visiting my sister and didn’t have my jigsaw with me, so I had to come up with a way to build a ferris wheel with a minimal number of cuts. I began by making each of the sixteen spokes out of brass strips joined by brass tube and steel wire, scratching the heck out of my fingertips in the process. I joined all of these together, using lots of tiny bolts and quart paint can lids as the hubs. On the perimeter of the wheel, I connected the spokes with more brass strips and more teeny tiny bolts.  Unfortunately, I didn’t get the two halves of the hub aligned exactly perfectly, so the spokes wound up a tiny bit torqued. It didn’t ultimately impact the functionality of the wheel, but I’ll know to pay more attention to that next time. You know, the next time I make a zebra cupcake ferris wheel. Though the lesson would probably be applicable to other African animal cupcake ferris wheels as well.

For the frame to hold up the ferris wheel, I used half-inch aluminum channel, bolted together and embedded in the wooden base. To my surprise, the wheel turned perfectly as soon as I mounted it in the frame and attached the crank handle. The next challenge, though, was to make the cars work.

I really wanted people to be able to pick up the entire cupcake car and eat the entire thing. So I made basically little wire rings to set the cupcakes in. Obviously, these had to spin freely so that the cupcakes stayed upright all the way around the wheel (this being the essence of a ferris wheel). This would have been very easy if I had kept the strips connecting the spokes back from the end of the spokes about an additional half an inch. As it was, I had a bit of a struggle to keep the rings from catching on the brass strips, but in the end I managed it. One more thing I’ll know to do differently the next time I make a cupcake ferris wheel.

In order to make the cups themselves edible, I poured candy melts into silicone cupcake cups. For many years, I have been vehemently opposed to candy melts because I think they taste disgusting and the colors they come in are generally not in tune with my aesthetic, but my sister gave me that trendy little cake pop kit for Christmas, and I wanted to try out some of the techniques. I have been confirmed in my belief that they taste disgusting, but I suppose that they do have their uses.  After all, I use fondant, too, and that doesn’t taste very good either.

I let Sam pick out the colors of candy melts that he wanted for the cups and he chose pink and baby blue. Much like candy melts in general, this is basically the exact opposite of my aesthetic (and, as my sister pointed out, made it look a bit like a baby shower cake) but, hey, it’s his birthday. Who am I to argue? I gave the cups a second coat of candy melt on the inside to give them added structural stability and to make sure that the weight of the cupcake was concentrated in the bottom so they wouldn’t flip upside down. I dipped the top edge in white candy melt to give them a decorative rim that would also serve to hold them in the wire rings more effectively. I then attempted to ameliorate the pastel-ness of the cups by giving them distressed black streaks in some of the flutes of the cupcake cups. I told myself I was striving for a vaguely Victorian steam-punk aesthetic. I’m not sure that I entirely got there.

A few days before the party, I made a very important discovery.  Sam’s grandparents gave him an awesome set of Little People animals for his birthday, which he absolutely loved.  He even refused to eat dinner because he was too busy playing with them, which, coming from Sam, is a huge complement.  He pulled the giraffe out of the bag and proudly exclaimed, “Zebra!”  Uh oh.  I remembered that Sam does not always differentiate between zebras and giraffes.  So I pulled out the zebra and the giraffe and asked him which one was a zebra cupcake.  First he pointed to the giraffe.  Then he pointed to the zebra.  So I decided to hedge my bets and make both zebra and giraffe cupcakes.

For the cake recipe, I used a new marbled olive oil cake recipe.  I had initially chosen this recipe because the marbling resembled zebra stripes. It actually turned out to be perfect because the marbling, both in color and in pattern, is about halfway between a zebra and a giraffe. It also turned out to be quite delicious. Generally, when I’m making a cake, the last thing I want to do is eat cake, but I snacked on this cake the entire time.

Once the cupcakes were baked, I used essentially the cake pop technique to add zebra and giraffe heads to them. This involves crumbling up cake and mixing it with frosting to make a thick paste and then shaping it as desired. To make the zebra heads, I did this directly on top of the cupcakes. Because the giraffes needed long, thin necks, I made them separately then popped them in the refrigerator to harden up enough that I could then embed them in the cupcakes.

I dipped the zebras in white candy melts and the giraffes in yellowish candy melts. Once this hardened, I peeled the paper off the cupcakes and set the cupcakes in the candy melt cups. Then I used food coloring and candy melts to paint on the patterns, mouths, and eyes. I tried to make them look smug about the fact that the lion couldn’t reach them. I think that next time I should make the eyes more prominent by using something three-dimensional like a candy sprinkle. I also added candy melt ears, manes, and (in the case of the giraffes) horns.

To make the lion look like it was in mid-lunge, I made a base for it using brass strips and foam core so that only the back two feet would be touching the ground.  I bolted this to the cake base and built the lion on top of it. I wish that the base had been a little bigger, because I couldn’t really place the lion in the way I would have liked. He wound leaping more alongside the ferris wheel than at the ferris wheel. I also wish I had waited until the cake cooled completely before I put it on the base, because then I would have had less trouble with the cake melting the icing and sliding on the base. After I carved the cake and added a little mass with some of the cake pop goo, I used buttercream icing for the fur and candy melt for the ears and tail. In the end, I wasn’t particularly happy with the way the lion turned out. It was more awkward than scary, but not cartoony enough to be fun. Just as I was feeling most disappointed in how the lion turned out, Sam woke up and saw it. He gave a squeal of unmitigated delight and yelled “A lion!” So apparently, my lion wasn’t such a failure after all. For days after the party, Sam wandered around saying, “I ate the tail!”

At an early point in the process, I had planned to dip the entire ferris wheel in candy melt. Fortunately, I gave this idea up before I tried it, as the results would doubtless have been disastrous. However, I also couldn’t leave it entirely unadorned. For one thing, it clashed with the baby shower pink and blue cupcake cups. For another, Alex pointed out to me that ferris wheels are colorful.  So I decorated it with red, blue, and yellow candy melt squiggles and dots. I was reasonably pleased with this effect and Alex also gave it her stamp of approval.

The final touches were to decorate the base. By this time it was the morning of the party and I had been up all night working on the cake. So the base sort of got short changed. I threw down a layer of pressed sugar dirt and then brushed on some different shades of brown food coloring. I didn’t have my airbrush with me, so the results weren’t as subtle as I would have liked.  I also tried something new to make the savannah grasses. I used puff pastry, brushed with green food coloring, and cut into grass shapes. In the end, it looked more like french fries than grass, but it was still a fun experiment.

Right before the party, I set all the animals in the ferris wheel. I had to make a few tweaks to get them all to rotate freely, but all in all it really worked remarkably well. Only one zebra fell out in the process, but I had extras, so it wasn’t a problem.The party was great. All the kids took a turn spinning the ferris wheel and they were all very serious about not spinning it too fast. I served the lion to the adults, because it didn’t have candy melt all over it. The kids, of course, loved the candy melts. In fact, Alex ate only the candy melt portion and ignored the actual cake. Of course, I still have no idea what Sam actually imagined that zebra cupcakes are, but he seemed pleased with what I came up with, which is really all that matters. And now he has a two-foot diameter metal ferris wheel to treasure forever.

Axe Cop Pumpkin

Wexter and Axe Cop are off to fight bad guys on the moon.

Mater and Lightning McQueen Cake

For my little friend Max’s second birthday cake, the only guideline that his parents gave me was that the party was Cars themed. So I asked my five-year-old niece for her expert advice on designing a Cars cake. She suggested that I make Mater and Lighting bumping tires. What she meant by this was the Cars equivalent of the fist-bump. So the idea that I came up with was a scene wherein Lightning and Mater had just made a cake for Max and decorated it with oil (because that would be delicious to a car). Of course, Mater and Lightning probably haven’t had much experience with making cakes and decorating for parties, so they’ve made a bit of a mess of things, with oil spills and torn streamers. My plan was to have Lightning hanging from birthday streamers wrapped around telephone poles, as if he’d gotten himself tangled while hanging them. This was, of course, meant to be reminiscent of the scene in Cars where Lightning gets tangled in the telephone wires. In the end, this didn’t work out, but I still think the cake overall was a success (and that, next time, I could make the hanging effect actually work).

As with many of my cakes, I made a lot of gum paste pieces in advance, especially for Mater’s bed and tow hook. And, of course, I made fondant tires, which are coming to be quite a specialty of mine. I was especially pleased with Lightning’s tires, once I painted “Lightyear” on them.

I made the telephone poles out of aluminum rod covered with fondant and I made a wooden base for Lightning with brass strips bolted to it, with which I planned to hang Lightning from the telephone poles. This meant that I had to make Lightning’s entire undercarriage, since it would all be visible. I’m not sure whether Lightning’s undercarriage is ever visible in the movie, but I found a Lightning toy that had a fairly detailed undercarriage for me to copy.

With the advance work done, it was time to make the cake. I tried a new marble cake recipe because Max’s mother told me that she likes marble cake. I think it was a tasty recipe, but, oddly, it was a little more challenging than a monochromatic cake to carve. The two colors made the shape of the cake a little harder to perceive as I was working on it.

The little birthday cake was pretty easy, even though I actually don’t do very many simple stacked cakes because they don’t generally interest me. I did a simple buttercream icing on it, and textured it a bit with a spatula. I was striving for that fine line between making the cake look like Lightning and Mater didn’t have much experience making cakes and making the cake look like I didn’t have much experience making cakes. I think I walked the line relatively successfully.

Carving Mater and Lightning went well, again using toys as helpful models. After a quick crumb coat, I was ready to cover them with fondant. Then the challenge was to get all the details on, since both Lightning and Mater have very specific paint jobs. (For those Cars aficionados out there, I went with the original Cars Mater and Lightning, as opposed to the Cars 2 Mater and Lightning, having ascertained that Max hadn’t yet seen Car 2 yet.)

Mater, of course, is so rusty that you start with the brown and then add the patches of blue and green paint on top. I assembled his bed and tow hook with royal icing, which took a bit of time, but it wound up sturdier than I was afraid it might be, which is good since I had to take the cake on a two hour drive to get to the party. I applied white gum paste for the eyes / windshield and blue-grey gum paste for the side windows and then added some extra brown gum paste trim.

To paint the blue and green, I used white food coloring mixed with paste colors. The nice thing about this was that when I then went in with more white to write the text on Mater’s doors, it created a little dark shadow around the letters, where the green paint pulled very slightly away from the brown fondant underneath. This helped highlight the text really nicely. Then I went in with some darker brown to make the rusty parts more interesting before adding the final details like the lights on his head and his one headlight. The most important touches were, of course, his big white gum paste buckteeth, which, looking at them now, I think I made a little too small.

For Lightning, I made templates for all of the decals, and then cut them out of white gum paste and applied them.

I think I did a decent job painting in all the colors, though I wasn’t entirely happy with the Rust-eze sign on his nose, since the brushstrokes were still fairly evident.  This is probably the sort of project where the ability to print edible images would really come in handy.

At this point, I made my attempt to hang Lightning. At first, this seemed to go fairly well. The poles were strong enough to hold him up and he seemed fairly stable. Unfortunately, after hanging there for a little while, he began to separate from his base and fall forwards. Fortunately, I noticed this and was able to catch Lightning before he did an actual header down from his perch. At this point, I decided it would be a lot smarter of me to take him down and put him on the ground – although I do maintain that, given another chance, I could have made this work.

With all three cakes – Mater, Lightning, and the birthday cake – in place on the base, it was time for final touches. The fist-bumping tires read well, I thought. I used piping gel colored black to write “Happy Birthday Max” on top of the cake, as well as to glob big oil drips all over the cake. I also added oil tracks crisscrossing the board, as if Lightning and Mater had tracked it around while setting up for the party.

The very last touch was the addition of the streamers.  To give them the look of two colors of streamer wound together, I rolled out two very thin pieces of gum paste and them stuck them one on top of the other and rolled them once to stick them together before cutting them to width.

I am sad that I didn’t manage to get Lightning to hang from the telephone poles, because I think that would have been super cool. But Max (and everyone else at the party) seemed to really like the cake. Like all children (at least in my experience), Max for some reason especially enjoyed the fondant tires.

Sneetch Cake

I have been looking forward to seeing my niece and nephew perform in school plays since before they were born. Finally, my dream has come true. At her pre-K graduation, my niece Alex appeared in their stage adaptation of Dr. Suess’s The Sneetches. My completely and totally unbiased expert opinion is that Alex was clearly the best Sneetch in the bunch. To celebrate her accomplishment, I decided to make her a Sneetch cake.

It would have been fairly easy to make a Sneetch sitting down, so of course I didn’t go that route. I wanted to make a standing up Sneetch because it would give me the opportunity to try one of the copper tubing armatures that I always see on Food Network Challenge and Ace of Cakes. I chose to attempt the pose of a proud newly-starred Sneetch thrusting out its belly. Ultimately, I'm not convinced that I fully achieved the balance and expression that I was looking for in the pose, so next time I'll have to take a little more care with the shape of the armature.

I’m not really sure if I made my armature according to industry best practices, but it seemed to work. I used 3/8” copper tubing, which was relatively easy to bend. I don’t think it would have supported a much larger cake, especially as the tight bends tend to get rather weak. I used ¼” plywood to make the circles to support the butt and the head and then I bolted the whole thing to a ¾” plywood circle for the base.

At this point, prior to the actual performance of The Sneetches, I knew nothing about the play except that Teacher Christine was playing the role of Sylvester McMonkey McBean and that it involved playing with a ball. So I decided to have my Sneetch twirling a ball on his finger. Alex and I have also been playing with a motor recently as part of a kit of science experiments related to light. The idea is that if you stick a circle of paper colored, for instance, half blue and half green onto the axle of the motor, when it spins the colors will blend together and you’ll see cyan. My thought was that if I made the ball red, blue, and green and got it to spin fast enough, then the colors would blend in the eye and look white – or at least yellowish grey.

To make this happen, I wired up a little hobby motor and soldered a circular brass platform to the top of it to hold up the cake ball. Because the cake ball was going to be pretty small, I just duct taped the motor to the top of the copper tubing arm.

The only gum paste pieces that I made in advance were the nose / beak (I’m not sure of the exact anatomy of a Sneetch), the eyes, and the ball, which I formed around a 3” diameter rubber ball.

The crux of anything Sneetch-related is, of course, the belly star, or lack thereof. My plan was to attempt to use a technique that I saw Mary Maher use on Last Cake Standing – glow-in-the-dark piping gel. By painting the star with club soda, which contains quinine, which fluoresces under blacklight, and implanting a blacklight in the base of the cake, I hoped to be able to make the belly star appear and disappear like in the story.

The first step in bringing this idea to life as to test the club soda. I tried a couple different ways of incorporating the club soda into piping gel, as well as just painting with the pure club soda. The most effective glow turned out to come from the star painted solely with the pure club soda, but overall it wasn’t really as impressive as I hoped that it would be. But I went ahead with it anyway, by cutting a hole in the cake’s plywood base and sticking my blacklight bulb in underneath. I frankly wasn’t confident that the effect would be anything to write home about, but it was the best I could do for a first try. I covered the base with brown pressed sugar to simulate the Sneetches’ beaches.

Because I was trying to keep the cake small, I started with just six 6” round cakes – 4 for body and two for the head with enough scrap left over for the ball. I torted and filled them using a white chocolate ganache because I wanted to make sure that the cake had the stability that you get from such a firm frosting.

After I carved the cake into the basic shape, I tried out another a new technique that I saw someone do on Food Network Challenge. I don’t remember who I saw doing this, but I think they called it “spackle.” Basically, you take the cut-off scraps of cake and stir it into some icing so that it makes a pretty thick paste. Then you can use the spackle to really smooth out the surface of the cake and fill in any gaps. I found that it worked perfectly to round out the curves of the head and the butt underneath the plywood bases and to fill in the seam where the body cake was notched out around the copper backbone.

For the fur / feathers (again, I’m not sure what kind of animals Sneetches actually are), I decided to used piped buttercream. I don’t generally use a lot of buttercream. I think I may be using a substandard recipe because I often have trouble with my buttercream breaking down. This time was no exception. My buttercream started out at the right consistency, but with the heat of my hand it rapidly got too liquidly in the piping bag.  So I didn’t get the definition I was looking for in some of the Sneetch’s coat.

On the belly area, I used a gum paste panel instead of the buttercream so I would be able to paint on the club soda star. This gave me a little trouble in blending the belly into the rest of the body. I’m still not 100% happy with the result, because real Sneetches’ bellies aren’t discernibly different in texture from the rest of their bodies, but I think I did a tolerable job of keeping it from being too jarring.

The ball went together quite easily. I made the ball itself in two halves of red gum paste and then hid the seam with a green gum paste stripe. For the blue to complete my attempt at RGB color mixing I added blue stars. I fully expected Alex to criticize my color choice because in my carelessness I had reversed the colors of the ball as seen in the book.  In the book, it’s a blue ball with red stars. Alex is normally a stickler for this kind of detail, but she must have really liked the cake because she actually didn’t even mention the ball colors. I also fully expected that my color mixing wouldn’t be fully successful because I didn’t have the food colors that I really needed. I didn’t have royal blue, so I had to use sky blue and I didn’t have emerald green, so I had to use kelly green.

At this point I also realized that I had constructed the spinning mechanism in such a way that not only would the ball spin, but also the finger that it was sitting on. Oops. Obviously this was unacceptable, so I had to whip up a little gun paste sleeve to conceal the spinning tube underneath the ball.

For the final details, I used a combination of gum paste and dark chocolate tinted with black food coloring. The only thing I really wasn’t happy with was the shape of the eyes. Real Sneetches have eyes that are slightly taller than they are wide.  Mine wound up wider than they were tall, which made my Sneetch look slightly untrustworthy.

We served the cake at a very small graduation party. Alex was delighted, though she was also deeply concerned with the effects.

When we plugged in the blacklight it got very hot, which began to melt the pressed sugar above it. So Alex spent the entire few minutes that the blacklight was on begging us to turn it off, apparently under the impression that it might melt the entire cake. The star did show up a little bit in the blacklight, but it certainly wasn’t an attention-grabbing effect.

The ball spun well, though not fast enough to fully blend the colors the way that I had hoped. Again, Alex was deeply concerned, this time because the ball’s rotation shook the entire cake on its thin little legs.

Alex’s little brother Sam was especially delighted with the cake ball. For days after he ate it, he kept asking us, “Where’s-a cake ball?” and we had to keep reminding him that it was in his tummy.