9 Foot Retirement Cake

This cake has been about a year in planning. When my dad started thinking about retiring, he wanted to make sure he did it right. He told me he wanted a cake that showed every job he had ever had for his retirement party. I told him to make a list. I new he had quite a few jobs, but I wasn't expecting 17!

First off I scoured the internet to find suitable picture that accurately described each job. Some were easy to find, others a little more difficult. I then made a paper model, true to size, so I could determine the proper sizes of the pictures, and figure out how long it was going to be.

Once the paper model passed my dad's inspection, next came making all the pieces out of colour flow. Colour flow is pretty fragile and needs to be handled with care. Because I was going to have to transport them 5 hours south on some pretty awful highways and because I am not always as careful as I should be, I decided to make 2 of every piece. This doubled the work, but I was taking no chances. If one piece broke, the cake would be ruined. It took me approximately 20 hours to finish making every job. I used wax paper covered cardboard, thinking it would be the easiest. Normally I use my cutting boards. Colour flow takes 48 hours to completely dry and so by the time was done I had colour flow on the both of my counters, the table, the highchair and in the china cabinet. Cooking and eating supper was a challenge for a few days.

My husband and I decided the easiest way to transport all the colour flow pieces would be pizza boxes. I have some pizza boxes that I use to put flowers in, but they weren't big enough. I called our local pizza place and asked if I could get some extra large boxes from them. Luckily they said it wouldn't be a problem. 10 pizza boxes plus 2 other boxes later the problem was solved.

I had a list going of thing I needed to take for baking and then decorating the cake, even so I was paranoid that I was going to forget something. My new method of packing things (besides clothes!) is to put everything in a laundry basket. It makes life so much simpler. Everything is all together and it is easy to carry. Every time I remembered something it went into the laundry basket.

I drove down to the farm on the Thursday before for the retirement party and spent Friday baking cakes. 5 different kinds, 15 cake mixed in all.

Saturday morning a few of us headed to the hall, they cleaned up, and made meat trays while I started decorating the cake. There were tables set out for supper and I covered all of them with my pizza boxes and cake supplies.

I covered the 2 x 10 my dad had left for the cake with tin foil and got to work. I did break a couple of colour flow piece so it is a good thing I had duplicates.

6 hour later I had used 8 batches of icing on 9 feet of cake.

On the side of the cake are signs telling where the job was, and the brown signs on the cake state the job description.

In case it is a little hard to read the jobs are: Farm Hand, Ranch Hand, House Mover...

CPR Switch-man, Gas Attendant...

Custom Combiner, Painter, Graham Construction...

Garbage Man, Dragline Operator, Coal handler...

Apprentice Industrial Mechanic, Journeyman Industrial Mechanic, Farmer...

Foreman, Oil Analysis, Training Co-coordinator, Retirement!!

This is with out a doubt the biggest cake I have ever taken on. Everyone had such nice nice things to say about it, and a few discovered the easiest way to take a picture of it was actually to take a video and walk along side of it! I was so pleased that it turned out as well as it did with no disasters to speak of. (Except that while my husband and I were at the hall, one of our darling children overflowed the bathroom sink at the farm and caused a flood!) After working as long and as hard as he has, my dad most certainly deserved great send off into retirement.

Transformer Cake

So, I'm a little behind on my posts! This is my son's birthday cake from a few weeks ago. He told me months ago he wanted a Transformer cake, more specifically a cake with Optimus Prime and Bumblebee. And then he rattled of his birthday cakes for the next 3 years. I hope he remembers them because I sure don't!

I kind of mess this cake up - all my cake pans except a couple are still in the garage (the basement is getting closer to being complete! We are at the painting stage!) so I used the one I had in the kitchen hoping it would be big enough for both of the Transformers. But it wasn't. Never underestimate the size of a Transformer. I should have just gone to the garage and found my big sheet cake pan. Instead I ended up have to make 2 cakes, one for each Transformer.

To make Optimus Prime and Bumblebee I used the frozen buttercream transfer method. It is super easy and they turned out really well. I might have to start doing this more often.

He wanted Optimus Prime in truck form,

and Bumblebee in...Bumblebee form?

And then I tried to put them together so it looked like one cake and that is how it was suppose to be.

He was delighted with his 2 cakes, and wasn't at all upset when he found out his dad had eaten the last piece of his Optimus Prime cake because as he said - "It's okay! I have a another cake, right Mom!"