No, The Cake Is Not for a Bachelorette Party

Maybe I have been watching too many baking shows recently.

I seem to have an over-inflated sense of my ability to make showstopping cakes.

My birthday party is tomorrow. I am having a Moulin Rouge sing-a-long. So, naturally, I decided to make a cake in the shape of the Moulin Rouge.

And what a cake it would be! Just look at my design document!

Obviously my cake would be nothing less than SPECTACULAR SPECTACULAR! (*Ahem* That’s a reference to the movie, Moulin Rouge, just in case you missed it).

My very wonderful, supportive, and talented friend came over to help me make the cake. She told me she believed in my vision.

I didn’t buy enough of anything (a bit of a recurring problem for this entire episode). The first thing we ran out of was red fondant. So we improvised and made the roof of the Moulin Rouge red and white striped. It’s a bit of an artistic interpretation and gives the whole thing a decidedly circusy look, but it worked out okay.

So we kind of finished our first draft of the cake and the actual windmill on top of the cake looked a little bit…. overwhelming.

Yeah…. that is *supposed* to be a windmill

Yeeeeaaaaahhhh….

My friend decided to post a picture on Instagram to see if anyone could guess what the cake was supposed to be. It’s definitely ambiguous.

So my friend suggested we saw the thing in half. Which we did. Which improved it. But that was not the end of my problems.

Then I tried to make a beautiful flowery lace design out of melted chocolate to put along the side of the second layer of cake.

Naturally, all the chocolate broke to pieces as I was putting it on the cake. Fortunately, I knew I was likely to mess up the fragile piece, so I also made a back up. A very un-ambitious chocolate cursive writing of the word “love.” That one made it on to the cake. And even though it did break a few places, it kinda works.

My friend made lovely chocolate hearts and brought them along for possible decoration. Did she have a suspicion that I would wind up needing to improvise the decorations in the process of creating this elaborate cake? Likely so. Good friends know your shortcomings.

I had planned (as is evident from the very clearly drawn design document) to make icing flowers along the entire bottom layer of cake. However, as it turns out, I don’t actually have the right icing cap to draw roses (who knew!) and, what was much more inconvenient, I didn’t have enough icing to cover the bottom of the cake at all. You see, I told you I didn’t buy enough of any of the things.

Well, we’ll just have to make sure that this side is always facing the back.

You may wonder why I took this weird picture in my refrigerator. That is because the icing was actively melting off of the cake as I was decorating it. I’m kinda worried that I didn’t get it in the fridge on time and then when I look at it tomorrow my somewhat hideous little star puffs will be runny little sad stars that don’t even puff.

Drum roll!

Here’s the final cake from the angle at which it is meant to be viewed.

Clearly it’s not *quite* final. It’s missing the blades for the windmill. I had considered making those out of chocolate, sugar cookies, or pretzels glued together with icing. However, with how the rest of the cake decorating is going, I think I’m just going to cut them out of construction paper and stick them in the top with a toothpick.

When my friend got home and showed the cake to her husband, he had one thing to say about it:

And that, my friends, is the story of my Moulin Rouge cake.