Extreme Cakes 2006: The Golf Party

by Lee H. Goldberg

While baking a birthday cake for my daughter may not look like an engineering-related topic, regular readers of my columns in analogZONE will know otherwise. For those of you less familiar with the eccentrically-themed creations that my daughter gets each year, these little projects are a family tradition that goes back to her fifth birthday when I built a cake in the shape of a hot air balloon. Things have gotten out of hand over time; the cakes have become elaborate enough to compare with the logistic, creative and technical challenges I used to face when I was designing spacecraft.

The rules are simple. Anwyn gets to choose what flavor cake and icing she wants and I'm free to do what I want from there. Well free except, that whatever I bake, it must in some way relate to the theme or activities we use for Anwyn's party. This year's cake may not have been not quite as elaborate as the swimming pool cake I made for her two years ago (July 2005 Editorial Extreme Cakes) or last year's Hawaii beach cake (complete with erupting volcano), but I was just grateful I was able to come up with something that reflected the fact that we were holding our daughter's fête at the local mini-golf range.

The idea to create a mini-golf course on top of the cake was a seemingly simple plan that ended up being a lot tougher to do than I'd thought. Part of the difficulty lay in finding the proper miniature items to mimic the slightly-less-miniature windmills, light houses and other kitsch-y structures that grace the real putting paradises. Google searches for "mini-golf cake decorations" and related topics yielded no useful results and I was forced to use old-fashioned shoe leather to get the goods. Fortunately, my friend Rachel leant a helping hand and spent several hours combing two craft stores, a candy shop, and a pet store to locate an appropriately-sized ceramic lighthouse, a plastic SpongeBob doll, and a marvelous little plastic golfer (complete with plastic putting greens) to supplement the decorations I'd managed to collect.

It took one late night of baking and a frantic morning of decorating to put the edible three-hole golf course together. The substrate was built from two 11 inch x 13 inch sections of my favorite Texas sheet cake. I'd also prepared a little loaf from the same batter to cut into chunks which would allow me to build up the landscape features such as bunkers, hills and the little bridge I wanted to arc over the water hazard on the third hole. After marking the tentative locations of Sponge Bob, the lighthouse, and other architectural elements with toothpicks I applied a thick layer of icing over the whole mess and set to work on the decorating.

In years past I'd dyed sweetened coconut with green food coloring to simulate grass but none of the kids would eat those parts of the cakes. This year, Rachel found a great substitute in the form of decorative sanding sugar which comes in a wide variety of colors including two shades of green. This made excellent grass when mixed together and sprinkled on the fairways which were outlined by black licorice laces. The course's shark-infested lake was outlined in strawberry laces to contain the blue icing (and the sharks!). Carefully-placed chocolate sprinkles helped turn some of the white hillocks into formidable looking bunkers.

With the edibles in place, all that remained was to set Sponge Bob and his golfing partner firmly into the icing, arrange the remaining plastic baubles, and keep the cake cool until everyone finished putting their way around the real golf course. Despite a few cosmetic blemishes, the cake was a blazing success. Within a half hour, little remained other than half of one fairway and a forlorn corner of the lake which we enjoyed the following evening. My only disappointment was that a tight work schedule prevented me from wiring the cake with some LEDs or motorized effects. But we just got a Lego Mindstorms set, so there's always next year…

Comments? Questions? Ideas for mechanized birthday cakes? Write me at: lgoldberg@green-electronics.com

analogZONE
(c) 2006. All rights reserved.