Before anything else, thank you all for your many emails and comments regarding the medical situation. I appreciated the offers of help and your sympathetic words.  I really think that the appointment at the Diabetes Center this Friday will sort things out for me and get me access to the prescriptions I need. I will keep you updated on how it works out.

I finally made The Cake yesterday. Affectionately named The Taj Mahal, this cake was the result of nearly a year of dreaming by one four year old and an equivalent amount of procrastinating planning by one mother. I am embarrassed to think about how much money was spent on the supplies for this cake. It was costly for two reasons. 1) I am still not in my own home with my own things so I purchased certain items like 4 different kinds of sprinkles and toothpicks and ice cream cones that I might normally have in my cupboards.  Not incredibly expensive items, but still, it adds up. 2) You can’t buy 1 inch of fruit rollups fruit-by-the-foot. You have to purchase a box of 6 fruit rollups. You can’t buy 3 ice cream cones. You have to buy a whole box of them – 2 boxes if you want both sugar cones and regular cones. Etc. So I had to buy more than I used. Which means we have a lot of extra candy lying around.

I have come to grips with the fact that this cake was baked with 100% pure motherguilt. I have felt guilty that my baby! was not going to have a “real” birthday party with friends and presents and such. And she has begged for this cake and been anticipating it since just after her 4th birthday. And here we are, alone in a new place, where she has had a frustrated and angry mother who is drowning in an ocean of bureaucracy and sometimes taking it out on her.

My attempts to assuage my own guilt were not entirely successful. Sugar can’t make up for my poor attitude. But the look in her eyes when she saw the finished product made it worth the hassle. Here’s how the process went:

1) Bake two home-made cakes in a 9×13 pan. Purchase two boxes of cake mix. If you have an almost five-year-old daughter, she will likely want a cake that tastes like strawberries pink. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2) Measure healthy organic ingredients eggs, oil and water into bowl (the bowl is pink because I took pictures on the second cake instead of the first).

3) Add healthy dose of guilt-laden mother-love sugar-laden cake mix.

4) Mix with electric mixer on high for two minutes   wire whisk until smooth fork because you don’t have any other job-appropriate tools until you have a charlie-horse in your bicep.

5) Accept the fact that it will never be completely smooth when being mixed with human-generated power. Pour into pan and bake.

6) Remove from oven when a toothpick can be inserted and comes out clean.  Try not to be alarmed by the fact that the cake looks like a dirty, pink kitchen sponge. 

7) After cooling, flip the cake out of the baking dish and onto a foil-wrapped piece of cardboard with bottom side facing up (this gives you a flat surface to decorate). Try to do this gently so as not to break the cake. Fail. Carefully remove chunks of cake still stuck to dish and fit back into holes in cake. No one will know this happened when it’s covered with icing. Mmmm…icing! Mix and bake second cake.

  

8 ) Assemble tools and candy decorations.

9) Now would be a good time to put those nimble five-year-old fingers to use shelling unwrapping candies.

10) After second cake has been baked and cooled. Lay cakes side by side with bottoms facing up on cardboard.  Spread icing on top and sides to create the appearance of two cakes lying side by side one large sheet cake.

11) Using your guide, decorate cake to resemble the Candyland board game including candy canes and conversation hearts which cost you $17 because they had to be delivered to you via time-travel to the distant past from California. Voila!

12) Let one happy five-year-old make a birthday wish and blow out her candles.

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I don’t know if anyone is truly interested, but just for the record, here are some things I would have changed or done differently, had a number of factors been different.

*I would have piped on the words “Start” on the chocolate arrow and “Happy Birthday” on the starburst candies as was done on the Taste of Home website, however the icing decorator set I bought had a rather fat tip for straight lines and I didn’t think I could neatly write letters in such a small space so I opted to leave them out completely. But I think having Happy Birthday on the cake might have been nice.

*If our belongings weren’t in a storage container in Canada right now I would have used the little gingerbread movers from the real Candyland game on the cake to make it look a little more real.

*I would have been a little more careful with the spacing of the starburst candies, starting closer to the bottom edge of the cake. I didn’t have as much room at the top as I thought I would for the ice cream cone castle.

*That said, I would have had an easier time fitting the castle in if I had bought regular sized cones. I apparently bough the jumbo size without realizing it. The sugar-cone (which is covered in icing) was fine, but the others were way too big.

*Plan ahead so as to avoid having to order candy canes and conversation hearts online.  What a ridiculous thing to do! All in the name of love, but still! I would also have used full sized candy canes, not minis. The mini canes didn’t have long enough stems and they had to be pushed in quite far in order to keep them from falling over. Longer ones would have worked better.

*The icing I bought was Betty Crocker brand and came in a kind of a spray can that also included four decorating tips. I really only used the star shaped one as the writing tip was too large and the others weren’t relevant. Overall I was pleased with how it worked. At first I felt it wasn’t making very clear, sharp lines – the little flower/stars were looking melty and oily as soon as I created them. But after some fiddling and practising on some paper towel I realized it had more to do with my skill and technique and less to do with the product. I’d say, if you aren’t a frequent cake decorator, the product was worth using

*Not buy so much candy. Gasp! I know! But I really only needed one large bag of starburst candies, not two. And only one bag of the round peppermints that were around the edge. I always over-estimate how much I will need, which is why I now have a cupboard full of candy. Which, in hindsight, is not sooo terrible. But I could have saved a few dollars that way.

*I never did find anything shaped like a peanut butter cup but not containing peanut butter although I looked at Walmart and a lot of other candy-selling places. Maybe just bad luck? But I used mini York peppermint patties which are super yummy and worked just fine in the end.

*Let somebody else unwrap the four thousand goll-darn starburst candies! My nails are still sore from picking at the damn things!