Ethan's Blast Off Cake!

Last night was the annual Cub Scout Cake Bake Auction. The theme this year was "Power Up!" Ethan wanted to make a rocket so we put our heads together to come up with a cool way of creating a rocket.

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On Sunday night Ethan helped me bake the cakes that served as the platform. He also helped me bake some jumbo cupcakes, that were part of our original plan for a jumbo-sized tower of chocolatey goodness meant to be transformed into a rocket.

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Let me first explain our amazing and dramatic plans for this masterpiece:

Imagine a stack of jumbo-sized cupcakes over a foot tall resting on a thick platform made of cake. These cupcakes would then be wrapped with the smooth white of baker's fondent to give a sleek appearance. The fins would be made from King-size Hershey bars cut into wedges. Then to top it off, a giant Hershey's Kiss would serve as the nose to the rocket, in a flaming metalic red! Doesn't that sound fabulous?! Who would have thought it wouldn't work?!

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First we froze the giant cupcakes, so we could trim them easier. Then we tried stacking them with a large wooden dowel inserted for support. The cakes just fell apart around the dowel, so we resorted to wooden kabob skewers. Still, the tower would not hold its shape.

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On to Plan B: On Monday night I baked two batches of regular-sized cupcakes to be sold at the auction. We thought we would try for a skinnier version of the original, stacking the smaller cakes together. The thing looked pathetic. We tried carving it down to make it more even, but there was so little cake left it wouldn't hold together.

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On to Plan C: We stacked marshmallows on a skewer and called it good.

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So what did we do with that luscious giant Hershey's Kiss? Ethan stuck a flag in it and called it an observation dome.