That Takes the Cake

This is the cake that started it all. For months, when Hannah's birthday was mentioned, all she would say is that she wanted a cake like Aurora. She didn't mean the nice cake that the fairies made using magic. She meant this one. Turns out, it's harder to make a falling-down cake that it looks! Here's what happened...

We started with eight, 7-inch layers of orange cake.

After leveling the tops, we covered them with butter cream frosting. Hannah helped up to this point (she loves baking almost as much as I do).

I let the butter cream set for several hours. Meanwhile, I made some runny, blue royal icing. Like the favors, this tip came from a desperate Facebook post. (Thanks for the tip, Erin! She used this technique to make blood on a Halloween cake. Clever, huh?)

So here it is in all it's glory! Six layers high, I started to get nervous about the cake's stability, so I stopped building. About 15 minutes later, it was getting tippy, so I skewered it, with the hope that as the royal icing set up, it would become sturdier.

Turns out, that wasn't the problem. (Anyone who knows about cakes probably already knows what went wrong, right?) My cake needed to be denser to support the weight of all those crazy layers. An hour later, the whole thing had fallen over.

I was too sad to take pictures of that, but here it is the next day, after I had salvaged they layers that were still intact.

Oh yeah, I also ate some of broken layer. That's why half of it's missing.

So literally minutes before we served the cake, during the party, I ran inside and constructed this cake out of the remaining five layers. We raced it outside, to a delighted little birthday girl who was so excited that she couldn't sit in her seat long enough to blow out the candles!