Cake Off!

The cub scouts had a Mom and Me Bake Off competition. Everyone was to bake a cake together and then they were going to raffle off the cakes to raise money to build a well in Tanzania in the village of one of our Parish priests. Now I love baking a good cake and decorating it, so I was pretty excited about this task. It was before Thanksgiving, so I mentioned to Ben that maybe we could make a turkey themed cake. I figured it would be pretty easy to decorate a cake with a turkey on top and use fall colors as the feathers in the tail behind it. I figured it would be cute, relatively easy and seasonally appropriate. Ben loved the idea of making a turkey cake, but he had a different vision. He wanted the cake to look like it just came out of the oven on Thanksgiving Day!  So, we did a little research on the internet, enlisted some advice from Aunt Theresa (who is an awesome cake decorator), and figured out our plan. This was going to be fun! The first step was baking the cakes.  This was going to be a 3 layer cake, so we decided to make one layer each of vanilla, chocolate and swirl.  

Here's a fun little side story.  We baked the first two cakes that morning and put them in the freezer once they cooled (to make icing them easier).  The next cake was cooling on the stove.  The competition was supposed to start at 7.  Around 3 that afternoon, I was upstairs folding laundry and the kids ran upstairs saying there was a weird noise coming from the kitchen.  When I went down to look, our gas stove starter was clicking.  So I ran over to turn it off and asked the kids if they had tried to start the stove.  Then I saw the cake and immediately knew what had happened.  Belle had accidentally started the stove when she put her paws up on the stove to eat the cake that was cooling.  That's right - half of the third cake was gone!!!  So at 3:30, I piled all the kids in the car driving to the store to buy another cake mix!  BAD DOG!!!

Once that cake was baked and cooled, we got to work.  Ben started carving the cakes into the shape of a turkey.  We also cut out the middle and filled it with M&M's.  I mean, the turkey has to be stuffed, right?

Here is our final product!  We cut into cubes some of the leftover vanilla cake and toasted them in the oven so they looked like stuffing!

I was very proud of our work - great idea Ben!

Ben was so excited and couldn't wait to get to the meeting, which by the time we finished, was only in about 10 minutes so we had to get going!!

Ben apparently didn't even have time to change into his uniform, but that was OK.  They still let him hold one of the flags for the opening ceremony. 

Each of the cakes was judged and we won second place on creativity.  Everyone loved our cake.  We would have won first place, but this whole competition was to raise money to build a well and first place went to a cake that was decorated as a well.  You can't argue with that!  

Now on to the auction part.  Our cake went for $100!  Once they hit that amount, the auctioneer shut down the bidding.  We didn't know that was going to happen and Paul was ready to bid again on it, but got shut down.  Ben was VERY upset that we did not come home with our cake. 

This was the cake we eventually came home with.

I promised him we could make the turkey cake again, but we will see if he remembers next Thanksgiving.  It was really fun though and we both were proud of our cake.