Fallen Angel

The following is a true story, one that happened a few years ago.

“Mommy, is it time to look at the cake book?” my soon-to-be five-year-old daughter asks with eager anticipation. I mentally check the date. Yep, her birthday is really only a week away.

“Sure, honey,” I sigh, reaching for the “Baker’s Cut-Up Cake Party Book” with fear and trepidation.

Some of my fondest memories as a child are of picking out my birthday cake from this very same book. Will I have the daisy? The house? Choosing was part of the birthday fun.

When I had children of my own, I called my mother and begged for the cake book. Visions of perfect sailboats and delicate doll cakes danced in my head. But then reality raised its ugly head.

My mother’s cakes were splendid with icing clinging to all the right places and edges ruler-straight. She wasn’t even phased the year my older brother gobbled up one of the cupcakes destined to be a turtle leg. The turtle turned up with the correct number of appendages and all was well in my world.

But when my oldest child picked her first cake for her second birthday—a deer head, a la Bambi—I realized I was in trouble. Sure enough, my deer cake turned out to resemble not a cute dainty fawn, but a lopsided moose. I froze the yellow cake prior to frosting it as recommended and whipped the chocolate icing to creamy smoothness, but still bits of cake flaked off and ended up mixed in with the icing. The deer looked like he had contracted a mild case of white chicken pox.

The subsequent daisy, umbrella, butterfly, heart and bunny cakes were more or less recognizable. More importantly, I told myself repeatedly as each birthday brought my cake foibles to the surface, the cakes tasted good. My girls were very forgiving as to small mistakes like unequal wings or a leaning umbrella. But I knew the day was coming when the cake I was asked to make would be a total disaster in my child’s eyes.

My cake Waterloo came one summer in the form of my second daughter’s fifth birthday choice: an angel.

On the surface, this appeared to be a fairly straightforward project. Bake a sheet cake, cut out the wings and head piece. Throw on some frosting, gumdrops, and coconut. Voila! An angel.

The cake—the reliable Starlight White Cake from a Betty Crocker cookbook—came out golden. I made the icing on the day of the birthday, opting for the cake book’s 7 Minute Frosting instead of my usual buttercream in the hopes that the 7 Minute Frosting would be the stardust needed to make this cake truly magical.

With a wing and a prayer, I picked up a knife and started slicing the cake. As I concentrated on getting the angles straight for the wings, I neglected to keep in mind that the narrow neck would become part of the angel’s face.

The Angel Cake, aka Angel "Beaker"

When I put the pieces together, the wings looked fine but the “head” piece sat awkwardly atop a narrow neck, leaving no room for a face. Things snowballed from there. The “yellow” food dye turned the white coconut orange, so the angel’s hair was more carroty instead of blonde. The gumdrops formed a necklace instead of a smile due to the absence of her lower jaw. And the icing kept pulling up bits of cake, so that she looked rather mottled. The angel cake ended up being an uncanny resemblance to Beaker from The Muppets.

When my daughter saw her cake, she said, “Mommy, it doesn’t look like the picture”—the understatement of the year.

I started to tell her that I was sorry the cake didn’t turn out like I had planned, but she stopped me by saying, “It’s okay, Mommy. I love you.”

And that made the agony I had gone through fade away. We took the sad little angel-Beaker hybrid cake to her birthday celebration at her grandparents’ house. The birthday girl danced in her princess outfits and happily gobbled up her cake and ice cream. In a five-year-old’s eyes, it was a good birthday.

As for me, I am girding my loins for the next birthday. Already, I am devising ways to convince the child to pick a layer cake with the name spelled out in icing on the top. I think I can accomplish that without too many mishaps.