Food Imitating Food

My sister wanted a nifty cake for her birthday this year. In the past, we'd made a scratch version of the famous Katamari Damacy cake, but I wasn't willing to go through that kind of madness again, so we settled on a design that would be easier to bake. Or so we thought.

Behold, the terror that is.... Ramen Cake.

In retrospect, this was a bad idea. The bulk of the cake was too thick to bake properly in our pan of choice (actually a steel mixing bowl), so we tried doing it in two parts by sinking a smaller metal bowl into the cake, then baking a smaller cake in that bowl later to plug the hole in the larger cake. Didn't work, though. Somewhere along the line of baking, observing, repositioning, and "emergency improvisations," there were roughly equivalent amounts of unbaked cake in and out of the oven. Three rocks and one ceramic shishi figurine also became covered in half-cooked cake batter in a series of events that I refuse to relate to the public. Suffice it to say, baking this bastard was hell.

Frosting wasn't much fun either. If you're going to make an artsy cake that depends largely on the stiffness of your icing, for god's sake, don't use store-bought "fluffy" whipped can frosting. We had to move the cake and it's decoratives in and out of the freezer in carefully orchestrated shifts to avoid a meltdown.

In any case, we ended up with a cake that looked vaguely like a bowl of ramen. I think if we'd put it in a real bowl, it might have been pretty believable. The noodles came out right, and the kamaboko (fish cakes), while, oversized, are pretty close. Kid had her party, teenage appetites abounded, and the saga of Ramen Cake came to a sticky end.

As for my birthday, taiyaki will do nicely. As long as I don't have to make them.