WHOOT.

Saturday, my friends and I threw a surprise birthday party for Philip. In England, they have caterpillar cakes, and on pimpthatsnack.com, which transforms ordinary desserts into giant centerpieces, we found a giant caterpillar cake. This was obviously what we had to make for Philip. We also had to make it vegan, for Lindsey.

So Friday was an epic day of ingredients-acquisition, and Saturday was an epic day of baking, baking, and baking.






We made two test cakes with the vegan recipe. The first one came out too much like banana bread and nothing like cake. After asking Emma's kitchen wizard mom for advice, our second test cake was AMAZING. We knew we had hit the mark. (See photo, above: we ate it during the baking)

Lindsey approved:


Now we had to make ten of them.





The frosting was my ninja skills.

Once we had the ten cakes, it was time for the jelly filling:



And the stacking:


We cut a piece off to make a flat bottom and flipped the stack over:


Then we iced it. This is what we call the turd stage:


Then we added the features!



THE FINAL PRODUCT:


Unfortunately, since we had promised Philip we would also bake pizza that night (unrelated, he presumed, to his birthday), he came upstairs to find us in search of pizza, and saw the back end of the cake, whereupon Emma smacked him very, very hard and yelled him out of the room. Poor guy. I don't think he saw much, but he certainly knew something was up.

Then we got all piled into the kitchen to wait for Lindsey to bring Philip in. This was the result:




You can see me flitting around with the bright red and black armwarmers,going up to hug Philip after he hugged Emma. I look like the dork that I am. And that's Atanu behind the camera, with his great line about the knife.

Random blathering:



And then the cake cutting:




I love them all.