Birthday Cake Countdown

Danny's birthday is a week from Saturday which sounds like plenty of time, but when you hear what I'm baking you'll understand why every night after he heads to bed I'm in the kitchen .

You're familiar with that (insert favourite expletive here) Disney movie, Cars? No? Consider yourself fortunate. Anyway, Danny's cake is going to be a scene (his favourite part of the movie) where the cars go out cruising at night and all the neon signs are lit up. I'm baking a large round sheet cake, frosting it black with white lines for road markings and then making stand-alone decorated sugar cookies of all the signs and various cars to stand on top. I've used this technique successfully with tractor cookies last year, and twinkling stars the year before-so I know it works. Still, given the level of detail on these cookies it is time consuming. Each morning I get up and mix a batch of butter cookie dough and each night I make the decorator's and royal icing to frost them. They dry overnight, and then I hide them before Danny gets up. So far this has worked. I have no idea how I will hide the cake itself, but I'll deal with that later-I don't expect to be cooking much the few days before so there will be room in the fridge to accommodate the cake.

You can see some previous cakes for birthdays and half birthdays HERE, HERE,
HERE, HERE.

I'm off to decorate cookies now.
The one thing I didn't think through was having an 8 AM appointment for his yearly check-up the morning of his birthday.

"Happy birthday kid, here's your measles jab!"
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Aside from that not being a really great way to start your birthday, it also means the cake has to be done the night before so he can have it when we get home. I have a day out planned for him after the doctor, though I had to re-think that as well because they closed the cheap-arcade with all the driving games. Poor Danny, when he found out he nearly cried:

"Now where am I going to learn to drive?!"

It was so sad, I almost cried. Anyway, we'll find the kid a new arcade to frequent but I'll really miss noisy, dirty, Nickel-A-Play in Omaha. Stupid economic downturn ruining my kid's fun. He's been through so much this year with the tornado, drug resistant staph, and now the freaking arcade goes out of business-and I still had prize tickets to redeem. Bastards.

Anyway, that's what I've been up to. Pictures eventually.