Pour some sugar on me…

The last couple of days have been FULL of cake. My friends’ theater company turned five this summer, and they requested a cake from me to have at their celebration. They’re called Flat Earth Theater, so the design for the cake was obvious:

I put so much thought and effort into figuring out the decorations - making chocolate lettering, making stencils and finding food color spray to make the map - and the biggest hassle ended up being the cake itself, which fell apart and had to be pieced back together with icing. The unevenness of the cake made it look rather amateur, but hell, I am an amateur!

It was the first time I’ve done chocolate lettering, and it was so easy that it inspired me to bring the cake-baking and chocolate-making to camp. So I spent pretty much the whole day in the kitchen with a dozen campers, heating up chocolate, showing them how to pipe it, and making alien-shaped chocolate sculptures. We baked and frosted two cakes to look like planets for the aliens - one was the aliens’ homeworld, and the other was a recently invaded earth:

Of course, the end result was the kids ingesting massive amounts of pure sugar, but we were able to pawn them off on their parents before they got too crazy.

I am, by the way, just loving this week of camp. This status message that I posted recently about sums it up:

“Wait, it’s FAKE?!” - a handful of campers, re: the letter in their mailbox from a ‘Dr. Dangerous’ informing them that she was away in Lichtenstein doing a puzzle hunt made entirely of pancakes but that she would send hints for the camp puzzle hunt via her robotic pigeon, Melinda.