Blue & Gold Dinner

Tonight was our Cub Scout Pack's Blue & Gold Dinner (an annual banquet to commemorate the founding of the cub scouts), which included a father-and-son cake decorating contest. Last night, ES and I started by baking the cake together.

LW got a good laugh watching us make a mess of the simple task of putting eggs in the mixing bowl.

ES kept wanting to crank-up the speed on the mixer, but I told him no. I know, I'm no fun.

Fresh out of the oven!

The theme of the cake contest was "transportation." ES wanted something like a CH-46 Sea Knight or a CH-47 Chinook cargo helicopter. I used ES's dry erase board to plan out how to cut the layers of the cake. I ended up using a pattern like the one in the lower left corner.

I had a really hard time getting this first layer of chocolate frosting on the cake. I kept swiping the knife with the frosting across the cake surface and just coming away with a bunch of cake crumbs stuck to the frosting which was still stuck to the knife. As if the Lord saw how frustrated I was getting with this experience, the phone suddenly rang and it just happened to by my MIL, so I asked her how to do it (LW was outside somewhere). MIL explained to me to put a big glob of frosting on the cake, then wet the knife and use the wetted knife to spread the frosting around. It worked MUCH better than my original attempts.

Next, we used some of this green spray frosting stuff. I think the color of the chocolate frosting and the green spray combined to make a pretty good sort of camouflage green.

Just to show that I didn't do it all myself, here's ES decorating it with some lights and writing "USMC" on the side.

Here we are at the Blue & Gold dinner with our cake. Not exactly pretty, but it sure tasted good!

Things I learned about baking cakes during this experience:
- You need to let the cake cool off before you put the frosting on.
- If you make a multi-layer cake, you're supposed to put a layer of frosting in between the layers.

ES earned four belt loops during the awards ceremony...

They were Computers, Map & Compass, Bicycling, and Chess.

ES and his friend J check out the new belt loops.

These were the winners of the cake contest. 3rd place on the right was a bus. 2nd place on the left was a race car. 1st place in the middle was river rapids with bears (Teddy Grahams) riding inner tubes (mini chocolate frosted donuts) down the river.

Under very close and careful supervision, I allowed YS to hold LW's camera, and he took this photo of LW. It's a little blurry, but I thought it was a nice picture of her.