"ariel and thom" - sorry for the delay

well, look at this. over a year since i updated this thing. over a year since i made the cake above. one of my new year's resolutions is to not be such a piece of shit... so here we go... in february.

this is an engagement cake! for some friends, ariel and thom, who have now been married over a year! it's supposed to look like a bottle of whiskey. maker's mark, specifically. which is their favorite, which i know because i'm such a good friend (still a piece of shit, but a good friend). and look! i slapped on some hearts and made it all romantic and voila! an engagement cake.

it took me forever to mix the golden whiskey color, and i still think it looks more like a bottle of mustard than a bottle of whiskey, but they loved it and never wanted to eat it, and maybe they still haven't eaten it. maybe i wrote this thing before they ate their cake. i'll take it!

if there are things i know a lot about, it's putting off writing and decorating cakes. if there are things i know very little about, it's whiskey. but, hey, i tried!

TOTAL DECORATING TIME: 2 hours (i'm making this up because i don't remember) + 18 months between making this and writing about it.

distilled, aged, and bottled,
sassy badger

"we love you, stacy!!" - words happened

a very sad thing happened. my lovely boss and friend, stacy, left grey's after working there since the pilot. technically, even before the pilot, if you can believe that such a time ever existed. some grey's fans weren't even born then and wow.

a lot of changes happened this year in our little show family, but instead of focusing on how really fucking sad it all was, we tried to celebrate some.

so, look over there! it's stacy in her sunglasses! and sweater! and scarf! standing in front of her old red saturn! classic stacy. the best part was that, at the party, stacy was wearing her sunglasses! and sweater! and scarf! classic stacy being classic stacy.

and don't be sad... look over there, there! on the cake board. do you see that beyonce wrapping paper? how great is that! beyonce is the best! we are all happy and not sad because we love beyonce! and beyonce loves us! because i'm from houston and stacy's from houston and so is beyonce. did you know that?

and definitely don't be sad because look! at all those words! i wrote them all! isn't that hilarious! that i would do that to myself! 

those words are the titles of all of the episodes of grey's that stacy has ever written. and it's getting sad again... but it's happy because that's an amazing career and holy shit!

but if we could make it about me for a second. that really is a lot of words. and i don't know why i thought it would be a good idea to do that. but i did that. and then i spent all of yesterday looking to see if there was some sort of world record for "most words on a cake." no such record exists, so i'm only half-kidding when i say that... i'm looking into it.

ok, back to stacy! we love you!

TOTAL DECORATING TIME: 3.5 hours + 1 hour on the guinness world records site, and forever scarred by some of the things i found there.

thirty-one episodes in total,

sassy badger

"bugs" - big

y'all, this cake was big. in about a billion ways. big.

this cake was two round cakes stacked on top of one another. each layer consisted of three boxes of cake mix. so, six boxes of cake mix total. as in, this was, essentially, six cakes. the cake was so heavy, easily the heaviest i've ever made, that i had to reinforce the circular cake tray below it with duct tape and hot glue.

minor construction and six cakes later, i had a big thing to decorate.

a big thing to decorate means lots of icing. probably went through about 4-5 tubs of icing on this one. my teeth hurt just thinking about how much of that icing i ate for breakfast that day.

the decoration also proved to be a big/huge/high/whatever-the-fuck learning curve. i'd never used the "grass" icing tip before (yes, there's an earlier post about it, but i posted them out of order because i'm lazy. okay?). all of the instruction videos about the grass tip make it look so easy. it is not. some of the grass looks like grass, others look like a cluster of pimples, and others look like limp noodles. appetizing, yet?

the other lesson along this big learning curve was figuring out how to icing the side.

let's face it. i'm very smart. i'm very talented. everything comes easily to me. so, i thought that this would be simple. crush some oreos. mix it in the icing and spread along the side. that did not work at all. it big time failed. eventually, i found a system of balancing some oreos on the spreading knife and then quickly sticking them into the icing. it almost felt like i was just catapulting them up there and hope some of them stuck.

i was also in a big rush to pull this thing off. i had to finish this cake and another in one day (see jerrika's cake below). the baking on this one took longer than the decorating. i had to wait for each big layer to cool off before starting on the next one. my life is hard.

but, the biggest big part of all of this was how much of a pain in the ass it was to load these stupid pictures onto my computer so that i could post this stupid blog for my five readers. 

so, i had taken these pictures with my nikon coolpix (pay me?) camera. i went to pull out the sd card to load the pictures onto my laptop. my new laptop doesn't have the sd slot. okay. what about the usb transfer cable? can't find it. okay. i'll just load the pictures onto my old laptop and email them. i go to get my old laptop. turns out the battery, overnight, has gotten so swollen that it's pushing the trackpad out of the keyboard, and it won't turn on. read the online forums, it says just take the battery out and use the charger. okay. i try that, but two of the screws on the bottom won't come out, so the battery can't be removed. okay. now, at this point, i remember that my nikon coolpix has wi-fi. it's an incredible feature (seriously. pay me.). so, i go to connect my camera to my unbloated, working, won't-explode-and-kill-me-in-my-sleep-laptop. i try and try and try. it's not working. i go to the forums. they say that it's easier to connect to the phone. okay. i try that. turns out you need an app. i hate apps. big time. i download it. after about twenty minutes, it finally works.

so, even though this is one of the lamest blog posts in the history of this blog, y'all better enjoy the fuck out of these pictures. or else.

TOTAL DECORATING TIME: 3 hours + some extra party crafts i got to help with once i delivered the cake. i present to you... "grape worms":

pay me, ashton kutcher,

sassy badger

"jerrika as stephanie as the easter bunny" - a goodbye

in college, i would often bring cakes to parties. it was usually someone's birthday, but not always. halloween, the end of finals, or just 'murica were all reasons enough to have people over to your shitty off-campus apartment. and cake was just that thing that went with underage drinking (not me, parents, promise!).

so, for the love of beyonce, i do not know why i thought it was a good idea to bring a cake to a real grown-ass grown-up party at an actor's house where other grown-ups and actors would be. where there was an open bar and caterers walking around with trays of food and desserts that were prepared by a real chef.

like, did i think it was just going to be a few beers and a bag of chips? apparently so. i'd just drop this puppy down on the coffee table that somebody picked up off the street. and boom.

again, this was not that party, but none of my actions seemed to align with that fact. i brought a cake. problem number one. then, i didn't even walk in with it in a nice cake box or anything. i just threw it in my own plastic cake carrier WITH MY NAME WRITTEN ON IT LIKE A FUCKING KINDERGARTEN LUNCHBOX and waltzed right into the party. well, actually, i walked a few blocks into the party, even though there was a valet because... did i assume there would be a valet? no. of course not. in my mind, this was a beer and chip party, and i would accidentally park in a permit zone, and i would feel grateful when my car was only ticketed and not towed at the end of the evening. that is how parties work. still. always. forever. i will never get used to how people be grown-ups, especially here in los angeles.

but despite all of my stupidity and less-than-great choices, i am glad that i showed up with that cake. someone who was a warm and giving heart to me (and hundreds of others) was moving on. jerrika has always been a bright spot during my time at grey's, and her character, stephanie, became one of my favorites over the last few seasons. i would miss them both.

i couldn't show up with nothing to say thank you and goodbye. and, often, i don't know how to be a person and say the things that i want to say. i prefer gestures to words most of the time (except this blog is full of words? lol idk). and as soon as i got the invite to this "party," i immediately decided that i would have to make a cake. k not a stressful decision at all.

what should be on the cake? jerrika was only around for over one hundred episodes, so it's not like there were a lot of character moments to choose from... ugh. when that became too overwhelming, i reminded myself that it only had to look amazing and be super funny...

the day of jerrika's party, i also had to make another cake (which i will post about when i find the picture i took of it). so, it had to look amazing, be super funny, and also be able to be baked and decorated in like 3 hours. and for whatever reason, that did the trick. my mind immediately jumped to an episode where stephanie had to dress up like the easter bunny to give candy to kids in the hospital.

it was hilarious for me. probably sweaty for jerrika. and perfect for the cake. an easy design and a pretty damn good quote to encapsulate the character leaving the show.

instagram: @hellojerrika

so, goodbye, stephanie edwards. and thank you for everything, jerrika hinton (including washing my cake carrier and bringing it back to me).

TOTAL DECORATING TIME: 1 hour + the easter bunny forever being ruined by sean spicer.

the cristina yang of her resident class,
sassy badger

"a street" - easy money

ok. ok. so here's the thing. my boss was like, "i got these plastic cake toppers. can you make this cake?"

and i was like, "sure!"

and then she put the cake toppers on top of the cake (wild, i know).

and there you go. that's the whole cake. 

and like, it was so easy. like the easiest. probably not easy for y'all because... obvs. but definitely easy for me. i'm pretty sure that no one's ever thought of this before, but copying other people's work to make money is, legit, the way to go.

it was still a bit of a learning experience. i'm not the best at making the tops of cakes completely smooth (i'm still better than y'all because... obvs). usually, my designs can mask it pretty well so you can't tell how bumpy it is, but this cake just left it all out in the open, and i think it doesn't totally suck.

also, it was only my second time using the "grass" icing tip. some of the spots were super good-looking and others, not so much (but definitely better than anything y'all could pull off because... obvs).

TOTAL DECORATING TIME: 1.5 hours + one bloody finger after trimming one of the cake toppers EVEN THOUGH i used child safety scissors because i want to be safe and because i don't own a pair for grown-ups.

wee ooo wee ooo wee ooo (a firetruck sound),

sassy badger

"sonny and matisse" - fakes

this cake experience feels like a fever dream. like actually. i agreed to do it while i was sick and the kind of tired that you can't wake up from. i slept fourteen hours that day. if you don't believe me, you can check my fitbit. and while you're at it, you'll see that i have over 12,000 steps today. no big deal.

anyway, i agreed to this in a less-than-ideal mental state. yes, i was going to make a cake no matter what. but would i normally agree to make a cake with faces on it? loyal readers (all three of you. hi, allison.) know that i, in fact, absolutely hate face cakes. 

a cool portmanteau for face + cakes is "fakes." and that's pretty apt because i feel like a fucking fraud when i try to pull something like this off. a phony. a charlatan. a sheep in a wolf sweater or whatever.

not only is this a "fake," but it's a "fake" with twins who don't even look like twins. and twins who don't look like twins wearing yoda and r2-d2 halloween costumes. in real life, it is the cutest thing you've ever seen. in "fake" life, friends ask, "why is one dressed like shrek and the other in a blue hat?" 

oh, i don't know, why do i even bother living?

the one good thing about these "fakes" is that they are usually made for a very specific audience. an audience who requested it and gets what's going on. an audience who knows that they are twins even though they don't look the same. that's the only good thing.

looking at it now, though, i'm reminded of one of shrek's more famous quotes: "do or do not, there is no try." 

so, from now on i will do not these "fakes" anymore. if you want one, take your business elsewhere. unless, it's super good business... then, i'm open to it... i've got two pairs of the same sweatpant to buy.

TOTAL DECORATING TIME: 3 hours + 5 refills of sweet tea at gus's fried chicken after dropping this cake off. i would've gone for a 6th, but the server brought me a to-go lid, the universal sign for, "please leave before you get diabetes."

not my gumdrop buttons,

sassy badger

"formation" - #blessed

(i've tried to start this blog about sixteen different times. which beyonce reference do i make first? did you know she's from houston? did you know i'm also from houston? did you know that makes our relationship like super special and real?)

this blog is not worthy of beyonce in any way, shape, likeness, or form. not even a little bit. so, i definitely apologize for that. is it even worth it to talk about other "art" when god herself is out here, walking the earth, making art, too? it's not. it's really not.

but honestly, y'all, this cake makes me really happy. like as happy as beyonce was with jay-z. like happy enough to write a whole album about him. so many songs about their happiness.

i do want to thank bey, though. i have no doubt that she mused me, that her spirit entered my soul and channeled her greatness through my tiny, tiny, disproportionately-tiny-for-the-rest-of-my-body hands. when i decided to make a cake for my friend's birthday, the entire execution of this thing came to me completely formed, like a lego model after you put the legos together. and when i was finished, i heard an angelic voice whisper in my ear, "good job, b." 

then, bey's spirit left me. and donald trump is still going to be the president. and everything is awful. and fuck america.

but this cake, though. this cake doesn't suck. right?

TOTAL DECORATING TIME: 1 hour + ZERO MINUTES HAVING TO MIX A SINGLE ICING COLOR. GOD BLESS YOURSELF BEYONCE GISELLE KNOWLES CARTER.

the hip hop rappin',

sassy badger

"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

"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