Throwback Thursday – The First Cake

So like, Throwback Thursday is a thing. Yeah, I’m a little late to that party. Well, I’m arriving fashionably late. Also, I haven’t done anything particularly blog worthy (nor have I taken any pictures) in the last few days, so you get this.

This cake here is the first sculpted cake I ever made. I had taken a cake decorating class at a Michael’s craft store and we learned how to make roses and pipe the edges of cakes and all that fun stuff. A few months later, I was living in Baltimore, probably watching a lot of Ace of Cakes by myself (I didn’t have very many friends the first year I lived in MD) and I remember thinking…hmm, I could do that. So I tried.

The fondant was the Wilton stuff from the craft store. Let me just say, that stuff is gross. It’s hard to roll out and it tastes like plastic. My cake was covered with wrinkles and tears, but luckily I was able to cover a lot of the imperfections with the red bricks. The legs and the top of the chimney were made of rice crispy treats. This was before I knew about cake boards, hence the aluminum foil covered cardboard. At this point I was still using cake mixes to make my cakes until a few coworkers mentioned if I was going to keep doing this, I should start making stuff from scratch. Also, cake mix cakes are extremely fluffy and not really great for carving.

I was so proud of this cake. I brought it to work and my coworkers demolished it. It also started this crazy cake journey I’ve been on for the past 6 years. It’s funny to look back on what I did then and compare it to what I can do now. One thing hasn’t changed though – I’m still making these cakes until 2 in the morning.

And as a reward for reading my meandering story, here is a picture of me as a baby looking like a particular former Korean dictator.