birthday

I never liked cakes with heavy decoration from the bakery. But for my own birthday last week I made a cake with icing on top. This is the first time I used an icing reciepe and it turned out awfully sweet. My boys tried just one bite and they gave up!

A busy morning today.  First up was a birthday party for my son at a local rollerskating rink.  The high point was the Spy vs. Spy theme cake that dstroy decorated:

Based on this image.  Note that the wick of the bomb was a candle.

After that it was over to Tastebud, where Peter Reinhart was meeting with a bunch of Portlanders who are testing the recipes for his upcoming book.

I met a number of his testers and tried a few of their creations, which were all good.  As I said in my previous post, I'm looking forward to trying the new set of recipes they are coming up with.

We also tried some of the wood oven bagels that they make at Tastebud.

Delicious, dense, shiny, and chewy, definitely the best bagels I've had in Portland. 

Tastebud is walking distance from the apartment I lived in in college and where we lived when we got married.  Sigh... if only it had been there when I lived in the neighborhood, back when "weekend mornings" meant "brunch," not "cartoons."  Oh well...

My son is a huge Legend of Zelda fan. He has been for years actually.

When he was 3, he wanted to dress as the hero "Link" (Green Boy, as he called him) for Halloween.

Here was his costume:

So when he asked for a Zelda cake for his birthday, I had to think about how I was going to do this. I'm not exactly a professional cake decorator!

I finally took some classic imagery from the game - the sword in the stone, the hero, and the Tri-force symbol that appears throughout the game, as my inspiration for the cake.

I started with cookies, which I cut and painted with food coloring ink.

I made a couple of Link cookies to choose from, and a partial sword cookie too.

Then I made a chocolate cake, which I froze and cut and rearranged:

And finally some cream cheese chocolate frosting, purple sparkle sugar sprinkled (his favorite color) and some strategically placed non-chocolate frosting with yellow sugar sprinkles and voila!

He liked his cake!