The Cake is A Lie

Four of my best buddies are celebrating one more trip around the sun in the next few weeks, meaning that there's a huge potential for overexcited birthday chaos, presents, and, 

inevitably, 

cake. 

I don't know about you, but I find the concept of birthday cake to be pretty darned scary! Mostly, that's because we've cannibalized the poor pastry, and left it to languish in grocery store bargain bins, smothered in horrendously artificial frosting. On the opposite end of the spectrum are the incredible, crazy, four-foot works of art that cake baking experts crank out daily for hundreds of dollars, and are completely impossible to fabricate in the average home kitchen. My mission? To find a middle ground. A cake which perfectly balances flavor, texture, fantastic frosting, and good old homemade charm. Have I found it?

Nope. Not yet.

But I don't know anyone who's ever been overly critical of free food, especially cake, so I expect all to go well with the first of four birthday treats!

The hardest part of this little guy's assembly was actually deciding how to decorate it- I toyed around with the idea of making it My Little Pony themed, (the buddy for which this dish is made is a huge MLP fan) but ultimately decided to go with something easier, and only slightly more mature- a video game!

The design in the middle of the cake is the logo of the fictional company Aperture Science, in orange and blue instead of the usual gray, and the circles on each corner are portals, working their weird magic on a perfectly innocent birthday candle. The cake is all vanilla; vanilla cake, vanilla frosting, and vanilla fondant. For me, this was basically an excuse to have a fondant adventure, as I hadn't touched the stuff before yesterday, and the results were pleasantly surprising. The taste wasn't spectacular though, so I plan to use the much tastier marshmallow-based alternative from now on. 

A much larger photo of the cake can be found here: Much larger.

Sidenote:

Since it's been months since my last real post, you can expect some minor changes in my writing style, as well as a few big things being moved around in terms of the site format. Just bear with me, and I promise everything will iron itself out soon. <3