fresh from the Makery: let me eat cake!

So, I had a birthday yesterday. As my brother likes to say, sixth anniversary of my 27th birthday, to be precise. Leading up to this year's milestone (I've documented past birthdays here, here, and here), I was a little nervous about the way the numbers were lining up, turning 33 on 10.10.10. But it turns out 101010 is 42 in binary code which, you know, is the answer to life and the universe and all that good stuff. That made me feel a little better. And I had a great weekend. I even baked my own birthday cake. A few weeks ago, I bookmarked this post on Boston Mamas (a blog I still subscribe to, even though I no longer live in Boston, precisely because of posts like this that instruct you on how to make a rainbow cake and rock a unicorn birthday party!). With the one-year anniversary of my Android phone case coming up, I thought, well, if I was to make a birthday cake for my phone cozy's 1st birthday it would be a rainbow cake, naturally. As my own birthday approached, I figured, hey, might as well kill two birds with one stone. Hence, I present you with the general-purpose Android birthday cake:

Since I'm not much of a cook, I knew I needed to cut corners to make this thing happen.  Neal's made a few tasty cakes in his day and I remember him mentioning once that he'd read that if you're going to cut corners, it's okay to use boxed cake mix and save your energies for homemade frosting instead.  I do like me some buttercream, so that's just what I did, using the Best Recipes recipe for vanilla buttercream frosting. I used Trader Joe's box yellow cake mix for the cake itself and it did not disappoint.  Unlike Boston Mamas experiences, though, I do think the yellow cake mix affected the vibrancy of my colors when baked, and might go with a white cake recipe in the future (since all cakes henceforth will, obviously, be rainbow cakes).  But it might also be due to the fact that I went with a more pastel palette, using green, blue, and pink for the cake and most of the frosting.

 

Isn't that perty?  Also, I only had enough butter for about half the recommended amount of frosting needed for a two layer 8 or 9 inch cake.  This wasn't a huge problem, though, since I knew I wanted to do something crafty with my cake layers and wouldn't necessarily need all that frosting, anyway (who am I kidding, you can never have too much frosting).  I used one round (cut in half and layered) for the Android head and saved the second round for the antennae, mini cake, and this morning's snack.  Since it was also little Android dude's birthday, he got a little birthday cake of his own, (which made its way to my son's daycare today where my daycare provider is likely "enjoying" the aftermath as I type).

Thanks for a great year, little Android dude. Or, should I say, thanks, Google, for making such an adorable little logo with a creative commons attributions license.

Oh, and a few new phone cases (here, here, and here) were added to the shop this morning. I promise the Makery will get back to projects that don't involve robots at some point in the near future.