"a house divided" - my first harry potter cake!

y'all, sometimes people are in love with other people, which i don't get. and sometimes people are in love with harry potter, which i get more than anything in the world.

my co-worker is one of those people who loves harry potter. she also loves her husband-to-be, but he did not love harry potter until very recently, and so, i do not, for the life of me, understand how she loved him before then, but okay.

still, once husband-to-be got his head out of his ass and got on the harry potter train (insert hogwarts express reference or pun or yadda yadda yadda), he was sorted into gryffindor. okay, i guess he is seeming more and more like a decent guy. except for the fact that my co-worker is a diehard slytherin.

everyone knows they're doomed. good luck to you, crazy kids!

honestly, this is one of my favorite cakes i've ever decorated. obviously. i mean, just look at it. it's really fucking good. this is just the kind of quality you come to expect when you come for the sassy badger. i don't know anymore, it's late.

while making it, i also realized that it was the first harry potter-themed cake i'd ever decorated. i cannot imagine how this is possible, but it's true. if this cake is a bludger, then i am a beater, and i smashed it out of the pitch. no one gets a harry potter cake ever again. this can't be topped. sucks for y'all.

TOTAL DECORATING TIME: 2.5 hours + 45 minutes of groaning after learning johnny depp was cast in the fantastic beasts sequel. ughhhhhhhhhhwhy.

mischief managed,
sassy badger

"minimalist" - happy birthday to me

it was my birthday in july. me and a bunch of my friends, like A LOT of my friends, i have a lot of friends, went to see ghostbusters. i just really wanted to celebrate me by ruining the childhoods of a bunch of whiny dudes.

i also wanted cake for my birthday, but none of my many, many, many very, very close friends has ever taken up the mantle of learning cake decorating. not that they would be as good as me. not that their blog would even be worth reading.

so, i asked myself, "do you want to decorate a cake for your own party?"

wow, that was a great joke.

never ever would i ever spend hours on something like that. these plain cupcakes were the best present i could possibly give myself. like, really, i would never ever do something so stupid as decorate a cake just for me.

i couldn't completely turn off that creative itch, though. some cupcakes had white icing. others had chocolate. some had no icing at all! crazy.

then, an even more amazing thing happened. my friends mel and ben, just two of my hundreds of friends, brought me cupcakes. and these weren't just any cupcakes. these were...

...cupcakes of all of my sheroes. these were dope lady cupcakes. so many of my favorite things!

now, mel and ben, my friends, which i have a lot of, took a unique approach to decorating these. they printed some pictures off of the internet. they taped them to some sticks, and then, get this, they stuck the sticks in the cupcakes.

where are the hours of tracing the images? and simplifying them so that they translate to cake? and trying to color match and mix the icing? and switching out between the many icing tips? and spending hours on it? and not getting any sleep before work the next day?

newbs.

geniuses.

to be sincere for a second, i was beyond touched by the gesture. i love my friends. the multitude of them.

ok, sincerity over.

TOTAL DECORATING TIME: 20 minutes + zero stressful thoughts while making these. i need to get out of "the game."

i have friends, i definitely have friends,

sassy badger

"hamilton" - best party ever

yeah, okay, it's been awhile. everyone's used to it by now.

typically, when the sassy badger drops a masterpiece on a party, it elevates the soiree out of mediocrity. how many of your college dorm parties had a custom pokemon/spongebob/lotr cake? a lot of them? well, then you were friends with me, and that doesn't count. and also, you're welcome.

all you other losers just had lame parties with alcohol and maybe people to sex with afterwards. gross.

this cake, on the other hand, was merely a blip of whimsy in an all-around evening of unmatched greatness. three words for you: hamilton karaoke party. if you don't like karaoke, fine. if you don't like hamilton, get the fuck out.

not only am i obsessed with the musical (after all, i'm not a worthless pile of garbage), but this kind of karaoke was where the hired dj just played the track and you sang along, and it masked your eternal-boy-going-through-puberty crooning. truly, the only kind of karaoke for me.

the kind of karaoke where, after a few drinks, everyone just sang along to every song anyway, and you all sang the second act of the musical all the way through. the kind of karaoke where, at the act break, we all went into another room to watch lemonade. the kind of karaoke where you're sent home with a tray of lasagna afterwards.

another three words for you: best. party. ever.

there were some professional hamilton cupcakes at the party as well. they looked much better than my contribution, but in my heart of hearts*, i know that human sunshine lin-manuel miranda would still tell me i did a good job. lin's opinion is the only one that matters.

thanks, lin. i love you.

TOTAL DECORATING TIME: 2 hours (mostly just trying to capture that twinkle in lin's eyes) + 1 month of party prep that included studying the lyrics and practicing cool ways to hold the microphone.

your obedient servant,
s dot badge

*i hate this idiom. but i learned to work with it, unlike burr and hamilton and...

"princess leia(s)" - the easiest

another sassy badger blog first... cupcakes!

maybe the easiest "cake" should have the easiest "masterpiece" written about it?

but really:

1. cupcakes are just easier to bake than cakes, hands (in oven mitts) down. i did bake more cupcakes than i needed because i wanted to eat some and i wanted to make them all as uniform as possible. so, i picked out the two dozen that looked to be about the same shape and size and threw out the rest. it was like the tinder of cupcakes. 

except there are no losers in the tinder of cupcakes because cupcakes.

2. i barely had to mix any icing colors. mixing is lit'rally the most annoying thing and time consuming and most likely to tempt me to stick an entire spoon of sugar right into my mouth. the hair and eyes were just chocolate icing, straight from the tub. and the skin was just a dash of copper mixed into a vanilla tub. and done. tub is a fun word.

3. i never had to change icing tips. another tedious process. the hair, the buns, the eyes, and the "glue" holding the buns to the sides of the cupcakes... all the same. i know a lot of you probably don't "get" "it," but this is like an elevation of the game, y'all.

4. the lips aren't even icing!!!! just sprinkles!!! i only had to put them on, and then they were lips. can you even believe it? i'm crying just remembering it.

5. i had to walk 8 minutes to drop them off. these were for my boss's daughter's star wars tea party. star. wars. tea. party. leia and rey were there. i saw them. no big deal. and the venue was 8 minutes from my apartment. by. foot. y'all, i just...

the most challenging thing about this creation was the oreos. and that challenge was a like the last movie of a book-to-movie franchise, a two-parter. what a completely not clever reference.

part one. oreos are delicious and also very bad for you.

part two. whoever is inspecting oreos does not have a cupcake like this in mind. sometimes the cookies were crooked. sometimes the cream-filling was not even close to centered. is it cream? horse hooves? plastic? this part actually required some delicate surgery be performed because i was not about to let any of these little princess leias walk out of my kitchen with a single hair out of place. 

but seriously, who is inspecting oreos? do you want to hang out sometime? call me.

TOTAL DECORATING TIME: 1.5 hours + a longer post than i was expecting. i thought i was making this easy on myself.

now a general,

sassy badger

"things one and two" - just two plus one cakes

this post is actually about three cakes. a sassy badger blog first! such accomplishment. such celebration. congrations, me.

my boss asked me to make cakes for her daughters' birthday. you see, they are twins. but they are not identical twins. in case you don't know, this means that they lived in the same belly for awhile, but when they came into the world, they did not look the same. they were just roughly the same size and whatever.

anyway, i also understood twins to mean just two small humans. so, of course, i would only need to make just two cakes for their birthday party. but, apparently, my boss, a medical doctor and the woman who carried just the two of them around for many months, does not use such logic to make decisions.

it was their first birthday, after all. they would need a cake each to smash their tiny, roughly the same size hands and faces into. and there would need to be a third cake for the other people at the party to enjoy.

just two girls. three cakes. in what fucking world does that make...

wow. such cute. such adorable. good job, me.

it was the first time a decoration had taken up the entire cake... if that makes sense. maybe we can just ask my boss, the logic genie, if it makes sense. one second.

turns out it doesn't make sense, so it does. but it was a new thing for me. i used different icing tips for the hair and the little shirts, and i think they look pretty stinking cute. such life and energy it gave me to see my blood, sweat, and tears smashed to pieces by four little hands (because there are just two girls) in a matter of seconds. it's like one-year-olds have no appreciation for adorable, hard work.

but, this, my friends was not where the whimsy stopped. whimsy? whimsie? because of its definition, you should be able to spell it however you fucking want. anyway, back to the wym-z...

here is that unnecessary third cake. this cake wished both girls, just two of them, a happy first birthday! and was eaten by civilized adults and slightly older, smaller humans.

as you can see, i managed to find wrapping paper for the cake trays that matched the table cloths and plates... at hobby lobby...

TOTAL DECORATING TIME: 4 hours + a small donation to planned parenthood because hobby lobby is the WORST. it has the largest selection of sequins, though, for anyone looking to decorate their birth control holder.

these things will not bite you, they want to have fun. then out of the box came thing two and,

sassy badger

"r.i.p michelle" - sad halloween

"hollywood is a fickle mistress," i said after looking up the term "fickle mistress" to double check that it means what i think it means.

let me spin you a tale, dear reader. a tale of shondaland legend. the tale of "michelle"...

so, like, michelle was working as an assistant at scandal. and then she started working at grey's as a writer. and then, a few months later, she was pulled back to scandal to work as a writer there.

tale over.

the problem, dear reader, is that i really liked michelle. we spent all of our time together. i mean, not all of our time. just 10am-6pm. and just while we were at work. and our other co-workers were there. okay, so we just worked together. but we had a lot in common and enjoyed a lot of the same things, but now she is dead to me. hence, the tombstone.

just kidding. that would be weird and over-the-top. the tombstone was just because it was halloween, and me and another friend dressed up as michelle and pretended to be her...

nothing weird or over-the-top there.

but the tombstone was part-halloween and part-see ya never. nobody blames michelle for leaving grey's. she didn't have any choice in the matter. i just think, maybe, she could have been more sad about it. if she was, maybe the cake wouldn't have been so mean.

that's not true. it would have been just as mean no matter what. i pulled the same shit when nancy left. look, if you don't want a mean cake made about you, don't fucking leave me. it's pretty simple, y'all. 

if i didn't have a giant knot in my shoulder, i would give myself a pat on the back for that 2015-2015 joke. and look at that grass! and that spider! and the font that kind of looks like bones! this is pinterest-level shit. 

and, also, for whatever reason, i made the cake itself green... probably just trying to be spooky-scary for halloween, i guess. although, nothing was scarier than my boss eating like four pieces of this cake and the crumbs with his bare hands.

TOTAL DECORATING TIME: 2.5 hours + 1 pair of white knockoff birkenstock sandals that i only wore once for the "michelle" costume. will trade for a philly cheesesteak or best offer.

daughter, writer, traitor,

sassy badger

"louis" - close enough?

are you there, blog? it's me barbara.

i didn't want to feel like a totally lazy sack of shit, so i updated before an entire year had passed since i'd last written on this thing. the last time i posted was april 16. today is april 3. i am WEEKS ahead of schedule. and i made this cake last july, which means i have MONTHS before a year would have run out on that deadline... that's the thing about self-imposed deadlines: they mean nothing, and i never stick to them.

i made this cake for my friend, cassie. that thing on the cake is supposed to be her cat, louis. it was for cassie's birthday party. ugh. at a pool. gross. with a movie playing. kill me.

legitimately nothing against cassie on this one. i just hate parties, pools, and movies. those are communist pastimes if you ask me. parties are the worst because people are there. a lot of the time, it's people you don't really know. pools are the worst because obviously. and movies are the worst because they aren't television.

but i am an incredible human being - an infj on the myers briggs, just like mother teresa and nelson mandela and mlk - so i went to this shindig. and i brought a cake because i think cassie was serving something like brussels sprouts, maybe the most communist of all the cabbages, and as much as i hate parties, i know you are supposed to have cake when they are of the birthday variety.

the only thing cassie loves more than communism is her cat louis. he is darn cute, if you ask me. and i know you didn't ask me, but suck it up. i really tried to make this resemble him, but i think it ended up resembling totoro instead.

for those who aren't the least bit cultured: one, ew. and two, totoro is a character in a japanese animated film. maybe the cake was more on theme than i meant it to be. japanese = communists. film = communist.

TOTAL DECORATING TIME: 1.5 hours + 30-minute google study on communism. oh my god, america, why aren't we doing this?

the red scare,

sassy badger