"texas cake" - mostly awful

alright, so from the outside, this cake looks like an all-around douchey mcdouchefest. sike, this cake is totally on fleek. it's better than on fleek. it's a 3 bedroom-2.5 bath on fleeker st. because that is a thing.

it's not a thing.

but, i didn't really have a lot of time to worry about what was going on on the outside of the cake because i was busy making the inside of the cake look'a like'a this...

that's texas, y'all. in case you couldn't tell, y'all. in case that crumbly, oddly shaped, weirdly colored mess of a thing wasn't so clearly texas to you, ya'll.

it might have stood out more if the cake itself was vanilla, not chocolate, but my sister had to go and ruin that. who wants chocolate cake? who lets the birthday girl decide what kind of cake she gets? i guess i didn't really have a choice because we ended up having cheese enchiladas for her birthday dinner. which i love, but she apparently HATES. and somehow that was my fault??? ugh.

apart from the cake turning out less than ideal, it was actually pretty fun to make. and really fucking easy. sike.

first i made the red and blue batter, then i swirled it, then i baked it, then i leveled it, then i cut out the texases (that's a word), then i froze them, then i made the chocolate cake, then i poured a layer of batter, then i baked that for a short time, then i put the texases (still a word) in that batter, then i poured more of the batter around it, then i baked that, then i baked it some more, then i baked it even more, and then, and only then, it was totally on fleek and ready to eat.

it was not easy, y'all. but trial by error, learn from your mistakes, if at first you don't succeed, or whatever yoga-hippy-vegan shit helps you sleep in your hemp hammock at night.

TOTAL DECORATING TIME: (i'm including the entire bake time in the decorating time) 6 hours + 4.5 minutes of a how-to video that made this look a lot easier than it was. 4.5 minutes of lies...

namaste,
sassy badger

"naser" - murrca

my dear, dear friend naser recently became a citizen of these here united states. of course, everyone at work had to celebrate because murrca. so, on wednesday we determined that friday (crazy how days of the week work, huh?) we would celebrate this grand ol' country to our hearts' content.

we asked naser if he would like a ham or a cake to celebrate his new citizenship. he opted for the ham, but this is fucking murrca. in murrca, you get both.

in explaining all of the doors that would be opened to him with his newfound statehood, naser told us that one of the big changes was that he could now run for senate, should he so choose. well, obviously, i thought he should so choose.

the thing about naser is that he changes his facial hair and hairstyle about as often as obama fucks with traffic in los angeles... a lot. so, i do believe that this cake actually does look a lot like my friend. but maybe not how he looks right now. or how he will look ever again. but how he looked at one point in time. (crazy how hair works, huh?)

the icing is obviously white and blue. or blue and white, depending on how the light hits the dress. i also made the cake itself "red." now, if i had made the cake as red as say a red velvet cake, then it would have tasted like turpentine. i'm not really sure what that is. something about painting, and i'm sure it tastes gross. all of that to say, the cake looked a little more pink than red, but everyone be cool and deal with. i can call that pink "red" if i want to because freedom of speech. because murrca.

TOTAL DECORATING TIME: 1.5 hours + 9 "patriotic" items i gifted to naser including a football, an apple pie, and toby keith's "greatest" "hits." thanks for the free digital download, amazon!

courtesy of the red, white, and blue,
sassy badger

"coogan's trade" - i'm a star

on the same night that i was making the construction cake, i had also agreed to make not one, but two cakes for my friend. normally, even i would say "hell to the no." however, he provided me with a very important piece of information:

"they don't have to look good."

here's the thing. he needed the cakes for a webseries he was shooting. without giving too much away, the character making the cake was not supposed to be good at decorating. do you know how easy it is to decorate like you worthless, shitty peons? you have it really good. you are, for sure, too blessed to be stressed. never forget, assholes. every time you're sprinkling your funfetti sprinkles and thinking "that looks pretty good," thank whatever beyonce you pray to that you aren't burdened with talent like mine.

even easier than looking like crap, the cakes needed to look the same... because continuity reasons. hollywood, you guys. making similar cakes was actually pretty easy because once i try something, i'm really good and perfect at it, so doing it a second time is no trouble at all.

i really don't want to give too much away because, who knows, he could make it big tomorrow and the webseries could get picked up by nbc (rip parks and rec) and SPOILER ALERT: i don't want to spoil anything that could happen in them. but "coogan's trade" is a fake show within his show. without further ado, a tale of two cakes:

honestly, by the second picture, i was worried that the cakes were going to turn out too good. so, i tried to mess them up as i went along. i hurried myself. i didn't overthink anything. i was pleased that they 1. looked pretty similar and 2. looked like the worst thing i'd decorated in a long time. 

however, i guess you can't cage in the genius that is sassy badger. i got a text from my friend after they were done shooting, saying that they had to rewrite the scene because my cakes were, in fact, too good. i felt pretty terrible, but he said it made the scene funnier.

look at me! crushing cake decorating and comedy writing simultaneously. that's a resume booster for sure. but, let me be real here for the first time on this blog, i am pretty excited to see how the episode turns out. i've never been asked to do something like this, and it was kind of cool. i'm gonna be famous, you guys. alright, sharing time is over. back to being a black hole of snark. 

TOTAL DECORATING TIME: 2 hours + 19 naps throughout the night. sassy badger don't sleep.

somebody bring me some ham,

sassy badger

"construction" - don't forget the milk

why did i take the picture of the cake like this? did i think the light from the blinds looked cool? hipster? nice? did i just need to leave the house and was too lazy to move it?

here we have another cake for another one of my bosses. i made young theo's first birthday cakes, too, and i am just realizing that i never posted a blog about them, and i don't even know if i have pictures of them. so, just like, imagine planes or whatever. perfect.

this year, the theme was construction, in case that wasn't obvious. what was asked for was a cake like all the other cakes i've made - with a picture of a bulldozer or a crane or something. but, no, i had to go looking for ideas on the intertubes. isn't it cute how they make the sides look like caution tape? look at the cute "dirt." isn't that a cool idea?

so, once again, i was trying out a whole bunch of techniques that i had never tried before. that's always a good idea when you are making cake for someone who you report to. and by always, i mean never. do you know what is a good idea, though? oreo dirt.

for every oreo that i crushed for decorations, i ate like two or three or nine. god, i have not eaten anything but sugar for about two weeks. in lieu of flowers at my funeral, please make a donation to the diabetes foundation. we cannot dia-beat-this at the rate i'm going.

like the frozen cake, this is not the final product. i dropped off the cake and a bag of oreo dirt, and my boss filled in the rest with toy trucks lifting and dumping the dirt all over the cake. she also placed some candles that looked like construction cones. shit was dope. too bad i wasn't invited to this party. or the other one. it's fine, you guys. it's fine. i guess i'll just see you every day of the week at work. (if you're reading this, let's skip on monday, okay?)

TOTAL DECORATING TIME: 3 hours + 2 trips to the grocery store because, despite writing everything down, i forgot to buy milk to drink with the oreos. priorities.

can we fix it?,
sassy badger

"frozen" - second time's the charm

i've probably been decorating cakes for about nine years. under the moniker "sassy badger" for about six. and this cake officially proved to be a first in many, many, many ways.

first, i wasn't even supposed to make this cake, really. however, after some intense and dragged out (my fault) negotiations with my boss, we settled on a version of this frozen cake that i felt capable of making. however, i might have been overconfident. which, for me, is just a regular level of confidence...

oh, right, this isn't my therapist's office. anyway.

second first, this cake is massive. the largest cake i've ever made. it's two layers of cake that take 3 cake mixes each. which is fine for the first layer. you bake it, level it, flip it onto the cake board, and voila. that's easy. flipping a second eighteen-pound layer on top of that, making sure it lines up, making sure it's level, making sure it doesn't split in half. that's another story. 

but, i managed to do that, and then i decorated it with icing and (third first) those sugar paper snowflakes. those were a real treat because they stuck when i didn't want them to stick, and they were very delicate. it was just a lot of hard work, you guys. do you feel sorry for me, yet?

once all of that hullaboo was finished, it took a lot more work to maneuver a 52-pound cake into a cake box that it didn't quite fit into without messing up the edges, but i managed to make it happen. i loaded it into the front seat of my car, and i set off for my boss's house. i got to the fire hydrant about two houses down when the cake shifted. ok. cool. no problem. 

problem. 

so, i took the cake back home and was just going to do some minor "surgery" on the icing, but, when i went to scrape the icing off the top of the cake to start over, the 73-pound cake went with it, and onto the floor it fell. 

after dusting it off, i got right back to work...

jay to the kay, y'all. i didn't need to be fired over a cake, although that would be another first. but, i did have to remake the whole thing, which was a first. in my nine years in "the biz," i had never encountered such a disaster. but i thought to myself, what would annie/elise/whatever do? wwaewd? let it fucking go. which is what i did, and i actually think the second cake turned out way better than the first one. and, because i'm a genius, i asked a friend to help me take the cake back the next day. success!

this isn't actually what the cake looked like at the party. my boss added a castle and some figurines and a snow man because i sure as fuck didn't want to build him. (jokes!)

TOTAL DECORATING TIME: (in total) 8.5 hours + 2 viewings of frozen, which is more than enough.

for the first time in forever, 

sassy badger

"dadbert" - surprise!

many moons ago, my father asked me to make a cake and write a blog post for him because i could not be with him to celebrate on his birthday. so, being the amazing daughter that i am, i flew all the way to houston to surprise him with a birthday cake in person... and then i waited four months to post the blog about it.

i said i was amazing. i never said i was perfect. (but mostly i am.)

the great thing about going home is that my bedroom is not also my living room and kitchen. oh and also family and junk. but the best thing about going home to bake is mom. mom who makes the cake and does the base layer of icing for you. mom who owns the nice mixer and all the colors and all the cake tips. mom who has marble counter tops as far as the eye can see, which, in my case, is only about six feet in front of me when i'm not wearing corrective lenses.

i was so hyped to fly home to surprise my dad with a cake in person that i did not even think about what the cake should be. do i work better under pressure? yes. was that the smartest thing though? no. win some, lose some. six half dozens either way. so on and so forth.

but, dilbert/dadbert was actually a pretty great choice. my dad likes it. it's freaking easy to ice. my dad built on this idea saying that it was dadbert, like in the way you pronounce "colbert." dad also likes colbert. it's a hat on a hat on a cake or something. i'm really crushing it with the idioms today.

also, this cake got a pretty fancy photoshoot. dad's birthday was in november. we had the fireplace going. which, in houston, means it was probably 68 degrees outside. obviously, my cousin had to arrange a shot worthy of instagram, whatever that is. so, here's the cake from a different angle, #nofilter.

TOTAL DECORATING TIME: 1 hour + my first layover in phoenix that didn't get delayed. there's only so much time you can spend looking at native american-inspired socks and pottery.

written and illustrated by scott adams, 

sassy badger