Kelsie's Cakes from "Back in the Day"

As promised in my last posting, I'm going to keep up with this blog while I'm still in college, baking or no baking.  So far, no baking. Which is really a shame, because I've had such a craving for those chocolate chip cookies I love.  Katie told me she'll send some in a care package for me, but either they're going to get stale and/or smushed in the box, or my family will decide they should eat them all without me.  Personally, I'm betting on the second option.

I did, however, scan about 20 pictures onto my computer and upload them to Flickr.  I don't have the dates for any of them, but I'm sure I could figure it out if I had a calendar and a lot of time to kill. Even though I don't remember the dates very well, I can promise you I remember the cakes.

It's funny to think that I've had cake on my brain since I was really, really little.  As in, three-years-old.  Granted, back then my ingredients were things like mud and flower petals, but it's the thought that counts, right?

There's no mud in this cake, though, just lots of sugar and cute little Teddy Grahams.  I found the instructions for this one on a magazine cover and mom and I put it together for my birthday.  When I say "my birthday," of course I mean Maggie's birthday as well, because when we were younger, we always had combined parties.  At the time, I resented it, but looking back, it really wasn't that big of a deal.  Sorry for giving you such a hard time about it, Mom.

As you can tell, this was before I ever picked up my first Wilton instruction booklet or visited Cakecentral.com.  If I had to guess at a time frame, I'd say elementary school, maybe 1999.  But the cake still provided a lot of fun: going shopping for the ingredients, baking and icing the cake, putting the little Teddy Grahams in their Life Saver floatie devices, making a slide out of bubblegum, the giant lollipop who's purpose I can no longer remember... Oh, and eating all of the leftover candy later.  That was fun, too.

We still have that tablecloth, by the way.

This next and final cake I'm showcasing for today is the Barbie cake.  I'm pretty sure every little girl wanted a Barbie doll wearing a dress made of cake and icing, but how many little girls can say that they helped make that cake themselves?

Sure, it's not as pretty or "dress-like" as the Barbie cake my aunt Elsie made for her daughter, April, but it has chocolate AND rainbow sprinkles, so I'm happy.  I don't know if we had three different sized cake pans, or if Mom just cut the tiers to the appropriate size, but it was probably the latter.

That Barbie in the middle of the cake is my pink Power Rangers Barbie.  She was my favorite.  She had this cute little party dress (which she's wearing) and her kick-butt Power Ranger's suit.  I lost one of her gloves, though, which was a sad, sad day in my household.

So there you have it: two of my childhood memories, preserved in photographs of birthday cakes.  But don't worry, there will be lots of cakes and memories in the future!