Tale of the Cake

The Weebles is allergic to eggs. This is really only somewhat inconvenient and really doesn't even come up all that often as we are used to going places we know she has food she likes and are good about avoiding it at home. Still... we hope she'll outgrow them.

The biggest pain in the ass about the situation is the birthday cake. When she turned one we got a pretty cake from a bakery and I baked her a little smash cake of her own that had no eggs. She didn't have any clue there was a whole other cake and wouldn't have cared anyway. When she turned two however, I knew she was going to want the "cool" cake so I contacted the only local bakery I could find that would do a vegan cake. I didn't need it to be vegan of course, but they insisted that was the only way I'd get one without the eggs in it. Devil's food with chocolate icing was my only option. I told the lady the situation and asked if they could please make it look fun for my daughter and write Happy Birthday Julie on it.. sure no problem they said. My husband went and picked it up.. and I only wish I had thought to take a picture of the hot mess that cake was. It was a dark brown cake (of course) and they had written the words in runny white icing that had spread into puddles and was pretty much illegible. I was a mess. My husband saved the day by painstakingly scraping all the white goop off with a toothpick and using some hot pink icing from the grocery store to jazz things up a bit. We added some rainbow Happy Birthday candles and it looked pretty darn cute. The Weebs was excited.

So I knew that there was no way I was going back to that bakery for this past weekend's festivities. My in laws are from Asheville and they had gotten a few vegan cakes for various birthdays we've celebrated there during Weebs' lifetime so I gave their bakery a call. I told the lady what had happened last time and she was really sweet and understanding. You know how little kids are, they want COLOR and FUN! She said they would be happy to do any cake they had without eggs for us and they could decorate it any way we wanted. YAY! I told them I definitely wanted a white cake and that it should be super colorful and that my boy loves dinosaurs and cars and whichever they thought they might be able to do better I'd be thrilled with. I should have known how bad it was when my father in law called after picking up the cake to ask what I had told them to put on the cake. They sent me a picture.



"At least everything was spelled right" he said trying to cheer me up. Off to Wal-Mart we went to buy cake decorating supplies. Here is the final version, courtesy of Andrew.




Hard to believe it is the same cake right? Next time around I'll know better and we'll just make the whole cake ourselves. The worst part? Both of these vegan cakes came from swanky bakeries that charged upwards of $50 for the darn things. I think a cake decorating class at the local community college is in order...