My First Cake-Decorating Attempt

Last night, as I finished decorating a birthday cake for my co-worker Eric,
I stepped back from my kitchen table,
and I laughed.

The cake was an absolute mess!

It was lopsided.
The handwriting, reading "Happy Birthday Eric!," was terribly messy.
It looked too small to feed the 6 staff members in my office.
And, to boot, the cake carrier
(given to me as a housewarming gift by my lovely sister, CC),
on which the cake sat, was covered in smears of suspicious-looking chocolate frosting
and fine grains of hot chocolate mix.

Yes, hot chocolate mix.

See, I'd seen people use powdered sugar to decorate plates of fancy desserts.
Since my cake had chocolate frosting,
and since I had no powdered sugar in the house,
I decided that cocoa powder would look just as nice.

Problem: I didn't have any cocoa powder in the house, either.
Another problem: I didn't have the sifter that people use
to delicately distribute these fine powders onto plates.
Solution: I'd opened a packet of instant hot chocolate mix,
pinched a small amount between my fingers,
and dropped it randomly around the cake.

It looked AWFUL.

I grabbed a damp paper towel and wiped it all away from around the cake.
Then, (unfortunately) I tried again.
I was sure that if I was more careful in pinching and spreading it around the cake,
it would look much better.

It didn't.

I wondered if maybe I should just leave it.
The white cake carrier was already tinted a little bit brown
from the chocolate frosting I'd made a mess of earlier.
(No amounts of damp paper towels could make it white again.
I contemplated using some dishwashing liquid to get rid of the frosting residue,
but since the cake was frosted and couldn't be moved off the carrier,
I decided that putting liquid soap all around it MIGHT be a bad idea.)
The clumpy hot chocolate mix at least camouflaged
the unsightly, stained appearance of the cake carrier.

It was then that I wondered what hot chocolate mix tastes like.
I stuck my finger in the open packet and sampled it.
YUCK.
Hot chocolate mix does NOT equal cocoa powder.
It was bitter and grainy. Not delicious.

Again, I got a damp paper towel and wiped it all away from the cake.
Unfortunately, by this point, some of the hot chocolate mix
had gotten stuck in the decorative cake icing that edged the cake.

Now, I needed something to detract attention from the
grains of hot chocolate mix (which was supposed to detract attention
from the residual frosting stains).
I got some left over chocolate frosting, slapped it into a pastry bag,
and began making random swirls of chocolate.
I cut some strawberries in half, and placed them strategically around the cake.
I then picked up the pastry bag again,
and made a big
27!
next to the cake, as that's how old Eric is turning.
As I completed the exclamation point,
I realized that this piped chocolate frosting
had a remarkable resemblance...
to poop.
Quickly, I used a plastic spoon to scrape away the exclamation point, and
I used some red gel to highlight the big, chocolate 27.
(Even better, right? Poop highlighted with red. Yikes!)

Finally, I stepped back, looked at my awkward cake,
looked at the kitchen clock that read 11:27pm,
and I laughed more.
I locked the top onto the cake carrier, cleaned up my mess,
and headed to bed.
I knew my coworkers would share in my laughter the next day.

There is one good point to this story:
I had eaten a tiny bit of the cake earlier,
before the decorating fiasco began,
and it was very, very tasty.

My first cake-decorating attempt... Ugly but delicious.

P.S. Remember those cut up strawberries? They'd leaked a nice, pink juice
all around the cake by the next morning.
Scrumptious!