.cake.

Today, my sweet, dear nephew Micah turned 11 stinkin' years old.

So I made a cake!!!

Yay!!!

And since Micah is well on his way to soccer stardom, I had to make him one of these:

That's right- A soccer ball!!!!

It's not perfect, but I am quite pleased with my little creation.

And since I feel like it's my own little baby, I took a bunch of picture of the process. I got the idea from My Sweet and Saucy who is basically awesome and a genius at cakes. I love her style. Very modern and awesome.

So I made the cake. It wasn't the greatest recipe in the world and the cake didn't taste all that great, but the frosting wasn't bad. If anyone has a good cake recipe, chocolate or vanilla that they would care to share, that would be fantastic, because the ones I've been making have kind of been duds. Or maybe I'm doing something wrong. Maybe I just wasn't made to bake cakes that didn't come from a box...what a sad thought...

Anyway, Micah wanted green frosting, so it kind of looks like a stack of thin mints piled on top of each other.

Have I mentioned that cakes are messy. It usually looks like the kitchen has exploded when I make a cake like this.

Look at that sculpting job! I've never carved a cake before, so it's not bad for a first-timer, I think.

After that, I just dirty iced it and cut out all of the fondant shapes and tried desperately to piece them together. It was quite the task. Very tedious. Cakes like this just take a long time, especially when you don't have all the nifty tools that the professionals use. Like cookie cutters. Veryyyyy nifty tools.

Ta-DA!!

The dimensions weren't perfect so the fondant shapes didn't go on as well as I would have liked. And I ran out of fondant because some little kiddos, whom I will not name, ate all the marshmallows. :) But it's cool. It worked out pretty well in the end.

We need a cake stand. For now we're just using the back of the cake pan, so it's not as epic as it could be.

Micah hasn't even seen this yet because he had soccer practice. How ironic...

Oh, and I'm feeling much better, thank goodness! Hopefully it's good from here on out.

-Ives