Cake wreckage.

Some of you may have heard of the phenomenon known as cake wrecks. For those of you who haven’t, go here and marvel.

As our first mission, we opted to bake our friend Les a birthday cake using cake wreck techniques. Since Les had not ordered the cake from us, we lacked any usable grammatical errors or spelling faux pas, so we improvised.

Step one: Coming up with a worthy concept.

At first we thought, perhaps we should go with something simple. Allow the wreckage to happen in the decorating details. Then we thought, why not make a cut-out of one of his favorite past time activities. That was ruled out as “inappropriate for the workplace.” We finally settled on an X-box controller, as the boy spends most of his free time playing video games.

Thus the “L-box” controller cake was born. Instead of spending time and resources on a cake from scratch, we opted for boxed vanilla cake instead. And to be fair, box cake tends to be moister and is less prone to deflation upon loud noises and bangs.

Step two:  Make the cake.

We prepared two box vanilla cakes in 9×13 sheet cakes, following box directions and allowed for them to cool once out of the oven.  We determined the best way to create the controller was to cut each sheet cake in half and stack the four on top of each other, with a layer of homemade chocolate coffee butter cream frosting.

From there we iced the rest of the cake.

Step three: Go hog wild.

We decorated the hell out of that cake. We used different colored jimmies and a piping bag to add detail to the controller. We even tried to write “happy birthday” on the side of the cake, but an unexpected piping bag error (it literally exploded under pressure) only allowed to “happy birt” followed by a large blob of icing. The wreckage happened without us trying to cause it. We were actually attempting to create a decent controller cake; it was in the details that the cake wreck was created.

Overall, it was a successful and tasty disaster; one we hope to recreate for another upcoming birthday. (Stay tuned!)