The cake

For the last 3 years I have been reminded that this year I am supposed to make a cake. Not just any cake, but a Wasatch High Football cake for my darling little brother. You know, the one that the seniors auction off and raise money for pretty helmets to protect their heads with. The ever so creative, clever, original and delicious cake didn't have any amount of pressure around it. No, none at all. Just 4 years worth.
So Deb and I put our creative hats on and sketched out the grandest of ideas and decided of course we can build this cake! Of course!! We had never built a cake like this before, and really had no idea how to engineer it, but sure why not? Nothing like taking a leap of faith for a cake that needs to be auctioned off in front of a thousand people. We don't do things half way around here.

I spent the last week building a cake.
Every day building some portion of the cake.
All afternoon.
Sleeping with clenched fists hoping that this thing came together.
Thinking, it will be just one more hour then it will be done. Just one more hour.

Tuesday we baked the cakes. The batter tasted good, the cakes tasted good. So we had that going for us, at least the layers tasted good.

Wednesday we made sugar wings and burned the crap out of our hands. They were way to heavy and we spent a good nights sleep trying to figure out how to make them lighter and better.

Thursday we made cake balls. Easy peasy. We dipped them in black candy with yellow stripes. The trick there was to make sure Hunter didn't eat any. Harder than you think.

Then we decided to make the wasp on Friday instead of all day Saturday. This is when things got scary. How do we make a wasp hover above the cake and not fall? We fretted and fretted and stressed all afternoon. We finally decided that we could do it. We had an heir and a spare in case things got sketchy.


Saturday morning we started the final assembling of the whole thing. Thinking, we can be done by noon.  We were delusional, like living in La-La Land delusional.

3 pounds of frosting, 4 pounds of homemade fondant, 1 trip to the grocery store and a lot of squealing later we completed the cake. And it was as good as we imagined it being.

Then we had to make sure Hunter could sell this thing. After all the long hours in the kitchen and fretting over it, I wasn't going to let him tell a thousand people "This is a cake my mom made... ..."
We needed it more along the lines of:
 "This is a 5 layer cake, alternating with home made yellow butter and chocolate fudge layers covered with a homemade butter cream frosting and a homemade fondant. It is surrounded by German Chocolate cake balls drizzled in yellow candy with wasps hovering above the cake. The wasps are a rice crispy covered in fondant and adorned with sugar wings, and completely edible. This cake was made 100% from scratch by my lovely and beautiful mother and sister."
We got somewhere in between the two versions.

But it didn't matter because the cake looked good, and even better it tasted good. Really good.
And it sold.
Trace didn't even have to buy it, which was good because we didn't want to have to see that cake ever again. We left the auction feeling good about ourselves. The cake was the high seller of the evening.
BOO-YAH. 

But for the record we are never building a cake like this again. Never.
GO WASATCH!

love love