My mother always made us awesome birthday cakes. We would tell her every year what we wanted to have on our cakes, and she would somehow manage to draw it. One year I asked for Jokey Smurf, holding an exploding package, mid-explosion. And she did it. I don’t know how, and I don’t think she knows how either, but it was awesome, and it made me want to be awesome too.
For Ruby’s first birthday, she obviously could not ask me for anything, but she did love one thing, and that was the Doodlebops. We watched them every day, we listened to their CDs and got their DVDs, and we even saw them live in concert, so there really was only one choice for the cake. It was my first attempt at such a feat, and it went pretty mediocre I would say. The picture makes it look a lot better than it did in person. Rooney looked like his face was melting, DeeDee looked like a skeleton, and Moe looked like a furry jack o’lantern, but Ruby was only turning one, so it was okay.
When she turned two she still loved the Doodlebops, but I was not going to repeat myself. She was still too little to really care what was on her cake, so I went with her new favorite show, Mickey Mouse. I felt that it came out a little better, although Ruby didn’t seem to know who it was on the cake.
Finally, when she turned three, she had an opinion. She wanted a princess cake. In fact, she wanted the princess cake from the store, which the artist inside of me balked at, but since it happened to be a busy sort of March for us, what with Simone being 9 months pregnant and all, I agreed. When I went to pick up the cake at the store, it had a huge crack down the middle of it, did not include the princesses in the picture we had seen, and one of the princesses was broken. I was furious, especially when they told me it was too bad for me, and would I like $2 off of the price of the cake. If you have ever been to Taco Bell with me when they have given me the wrong type of Chalupa, you know that I am not one to take this sort of thing lightly. I got the manager involved, I demanded a new cake, and I eventually got one, about five minutes before the party was to begin. I could have done it so much better and so much faster.
Having vowed to never again buy a cake from the damned store, this year I just asked Ruby what she wanted me to draw on her cake. She said Toy Story, which meant about 45 different characters which were all her favorites. Well, since we were expecting 35 people at her birthday party, I decided to make two cakes anyway, which made drawing characters a little easier. I put five characters on, and I don’t know if it was my best work, because I was a little rushed. Sadly, I was still decorating cakes when the guests started arriving. Still, I think it is an improvement over my Doodlebops cake, and I can’t wait to see what she wants me to draw next year!
