After the task of carving the bat-o-lantern, I proceeded to decorate this Spongebob Squarepants cake. After we decided to have a Spongebob themed party, it dawned on me that it would be pretty easy to make a Spongebob cake, after all, he is square. I tried to find an easy premade one or a transfer on stencil, but I couldn't find anything worthwhile. I was really inspired by this site (scroll down for closeups), but didn't think I could pull off anything that looked as good as those. I fretted about making the cake for a week and planned and practiced drawing out Spongebob beforehand. So here's how I went about it:
- Bought the usual Pillsbury Confetti cake mix, a can of white vanilla frosting and a can of chocolate frosting. Had yellow and blue Cakemate tubes on hand and bought some black. Bought a box of Yodels and pretzel rods.
- Made a batch of yellow and pink frosting 2 nights before. I was actually trying to get red frosting, but any amount of red food coloring added to white frosting will always be pink. Bought some cool red doodling icing the day before.
- That night after work, baked the cake during/after dinner.
- Had Doug tape together a cardboard box and wrap in foil.
- Took the cake out to cool before the kids went to sleep.
- Got the kids to sleep. I think Dova even had a bath that night.
- 9pm Carved the pumpkin.
- 10pm Started decorating.
- I outlined the eyes, nose, mouth and teeth in yellow first.
- Frosted the eyes, teeth and shirt white. By the time I did the teeth, I realized that a spatula was not going to provide good enough control so I switched to an artist's paintbrush and used it for all the tight spots.
- Frosted the yellow parts.
- Frosted the pink tongue.
- Frosted the chocolate parts. At this point, it looked like a total mess, but I knew the outlining would clean it up.
- Put on the red tie and outlined the tongue and cheek (no pun intended!)
- Started outlining the black. I needed Doug's help to "cut" the frosting so I could pull the tube away cleanly.
- When I got to the blue eyes, I realized that my tube of blue was all dried up and unusable, so I had to mix up some blue frosting by hand. Just did it in a sandwich baggie. Saved a little blue for the socks.
- Started the limbs. Ate a couple of Yodels that "cracked" when cut up.
- Frosted Yodels white for the shoulders. Ate more Yodels that were not cut at the right angle.
- Frosted the arms and fingers.
- Frosted the legs, being sure to get the stripes on the socks correct!
- Finally placed the last Yodel foot and looked at the clock: 12:40 am.
- Placed a sheet of parchment paper on top to protect it.
- Cleaned up and finally hit the hay at 1 am.
During the party, I got lots of compliments on the cake, brother-in-law Paul said that if I could cut the time in half, I could go into business making them. When it came time to cut it, I just did it robotically without thinking about all that time spent on it. The yodels went first and no one ate the frosted pretzels. Next time (next time?!?!? there will be NO next time!!), I could use some filled pirouette cookies instead. Of course, now Dova is expecting some sort of fantastic cake for her birthday as well.
In terms of the party.. I know there's the rule of invite as many kids as the age, but that would be only 6, and we always have to invite the 2 cousins, and friends Aaryn, Jessica and Nora, so that only leaves one for Adam. So I allowed him to make a list that was under 24 kids so that invites and favors were easy to manage. We invited 23 and did not expect all of them to show. But in the end, almost all of them did, and we had 19(!!!) kids including ours. It was total insanity for 3 hours, but everyone had fun jumping in the moonwalk, playing air hockey, beating the Spongebob pinata, eating the awesome Spongebob cake and opening the huge pile of presents. Next year, "one small present" is definitely going to be written on the invites. There is no need for so much stuff!! As always, I took over a hundred photos here.
