So The Girl is like many other kids out there and is currently obsessed with unicorns.
I remembered a video someone had shared on The Facebook about how "easy" it is to make a unicorn (or lots of other animals) out of a 9x13 pan cake.
It was her 4th birthday! A fancy cake was needed! And so I went for it.
I made the cake (box mix with sprinkles mixed in) the day before her birthday and so the morning of, I was up early to knock this thing out of the park and wow my family.
I realized right away that I hadn't thought about what I would serve the cake on, and I knew we didn't have any sort of tray or pan big enough to hold it. I knew The Mister would not be excited if I woke him up at 5am to share this info, so I wandered around the kitchen for a bit before deciding I would have to cover my biggest baking sheet with foil and use the back of it.
I covered the pan in foil, and briefly felt a little sting on my hand, but I was too busy getting nervous about how wrong this was all going to go to give it much thought.
Following the video, which by now I had watched 20 times, I made my first cuts:
I started to move the pieces to the unicorn shape when I noticed something red smeared on my hand and on a bit of the cake. It was blood. I had cut the palm of my hand on the TINFOIL and was bleeding onto the CAKE. Nice.
I bandaged myself up, cleaned up all the blood, and trimmed the blood off the cake. Thank God no one was awake and watching this.
I had realized already that the tray covered in foil looked like crap BEFORE I got blood everywhere, so I trimmed the cake down a smidgy more and left it on the cutting board.
A month before The Girl's birthday, The Boy had his birthday. I had a cake plan in mind and some ingredients bought - he is very much into Harry Potter lately and I thought he might like a cake like the one Hargid made for Harry - but then a couple of weeks before his birthday he announced that he wanted a totally different cake, so I had the package of white icing and a tube of pink icing already in the cupboard.
I bought the icing at Bulk Barn, it was some sort of "professional" icing that all you had a to do was add water to and whip. I had planned on following the video and piping little dots/blobs all over the cake, but this was not that sort of icing.
The pink tube icing went on sort of ok, but it was heavier than the white icing and it was looking like it was going to slide right off the hoofs - which it actually did a few hours later.
The black tube icing was a real pain in the ass and I was getting very frustrated that I couldn't get it quite where I wanted it.
Also, I feared the unicorn looked more like a pig.
I started working with the little tub of fondant I'd bought at Michaels, and it was wayyyy harder than I thought. I was getting pretty unhappy about the whole thing. At this point, The Boy woke up and came into the kitchen and was so excited about how the cake looked. He flattered me enough to keep me going, and together we managed to get that damn fondant shaped into a horn and tail.
The video we were following also had a rainbow mane, but we didn't have a big enough unicorn to fit one in nicely.
The girl was beyond thrilled with her cake, which made all the blood loss, sweat and tears worth it.
One super weird thing that happened, that you can see the starting of in the last photo, is that the white icing actually began to dissolve in spots shortly after the cake was done. The icing on the right leg above you can see it looks almost bubbly. So odd.
Very awesome YouTube video here .
