I don't think Ace of Cakes will be hiring us any time soon!

So you know how last night was the "un-surprise" birthday party for Mac? And you know how XRay Girl and I were going to make a Mad Hatter cake? And you know how I spent Friday night making seven different cakes so the layers could be made?

XRay-Girl and I worked on the cake for 5 hours and it just didn't work out right. Here is the experience, in pictorial.

Here is XRay Girl prepping our first cake with the buttercreme icing.

Here is the first layer of the bottom section.

Here is the bottom section before we shaped it.

Here is the bottom layer after we built it, sculpted it, and "dirty iced" it. After this is where things sort of fell apart... If we could've had a Mad Hatter Cake with one layer, this wouldn't been perfect. Did I mention that we were going to only use buttercreme icing on the whole thing since XRay Girl nor I had ever used fondant? That could've been our first fatal flaw in our plan.


In the background you can see that we are starting to layer the second part. And you can see the butter creme icing on the "done" layer starting to run-- because it was about 75 degrees with nearly 90% humidity. Yes, it was really hot and the icing was MELTING!!!!

This was supposed to be the second layer. The cake was too moist even though it was chilled. And the icing was melting so instead of helping hold it all together, it was causing the cake layers to slide apart. And about fell on the floor. So I caught it. So we decided to trim it a little bit more, so the whole second layer isn't going to really be six inches around. More like 4. But we kept trimming and got this:

three big piles of scrap cake. And that plastic pitcher in the background held the margaritas we started drinking when it all fell apart. And I have no idea where the Comet came from; I swear it didn't get in the cake or icing.

We then got out some more cakes and cut them up differently and made a second layer- sort of. But it was a small second layer. It was supposed to be six inches--- not even close as you can see.

The up side is that I made 2 of those little 3 inches ones, so we decided to cut one of those up to be the top layers.

XRay Girl is icing the second layer in green.

We are icing the top layer in orange. We were going to do the bottom layer in all buttercreme stars but the entire thing was melting so we left it iced in white.


This is the final product. I know... it looks NOTHING like the pictures. It was so hot the buttercreme icing was melting faster than we could ice it. We kept stopping to stick the frosting bags and the cake in the refrigerator and then taking it out to keep going.

We figured if we ever did this again- and we probably won't- we'll need to freeze the cakes and make the icing the night before and chill it. We're also going to make sure we cook in a cold room, as cold as we can stand it. We're also going to learn how to use fondant. Yeah... so...

Mac is the best sport in the world. Though it didn't look anything like it was supposed to, he thought it was a cool effort and he appreciated the tie into the Mad Hatter concept.

We had a good time and lots of laughs. The one thing I didn't show a picture of was then we opened the refrigerator and found the middle layer had slid off the cake and was laying on the floor. We just stuck it back on, after swearing a lot. We also had some icing slide off and I didn't photograph the blob.

I can say, though, we laughed hysterically!

And as Bragger pointed out earlier, it all involves cake so how can that be bad? We have tons and piles of cake, as well as the blobby cake. Can we still have an A for effort anyway?

Maggie