Kicking off Bear Week on the Brighter Minds blog, is an activity I remember from the days when I was a child. Oh, it was a grand time in those days. The internet was but a dream and great shaggy mastodons roamed freely over the glacial plains of Ohio. I would huddle in the family cave and wish that someone would invent comic books so I could start obsessively collecting them.
So, I’m not that old. I just sometimes feel that way after dealing with kids. Sometimes.
Anyhow, back when I was a puppy, I must’ve seen an ad on TV for a sculpted cake pan (i.e. a pan that produced cakes in the shape of animals, bears in particular) and, compulsive as I was/am, became convinced that a bear-shaped sculpted cake was the greatest thing ever. Someday, the person who eventually cures cancer will look back on their life with nothing but regret for all the laboratory hours they wasted not eating bear cake. That’s how great I thought they were. (I was a kinda dopey kid sometimes).
My Mom naturally refused to special order a new cake pan (that’s how special these things were. They weren’t even sold in stores!) but agreed to make a bear cake for my next sibling’s birthday. Here is what she did, as best as I can recall:
Using standard cake mix, she made two cakes. One was in a much smaller cake-pan than the other. With the left-over batter she filled up two cups in a cupcake tray with cake batter and baked the heck out of them all.
After they cooled, she cut a slice off of the cup-cakes, probably less than a quarter of the way through. I remember this part particularly well because I got to eat one of the sliced off bits. Then she assembled the cakes like in the picture and I got to help frost it. We ended up using gum drops for eyes because we couldn’t get the frosting to look just right.
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May 8th, 2007 at 3:37 pm
It’s funny, my mom did a similar thing! Those specially molded pans were REALLY expensive, so Mom ‘carved’ one out a a sheet cake. I think your method would work a lot better, ’cause it was a really moist, crumbly cake and supet hard to frost. Thanks for reminding me of my own mom’s creativity!
May 8th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
It’s funny. At the time, those fancy cake pans seemed to be everywhere, but I haven’t seen anything remotely like them in ages. Perhaps they priced themselves out of the market?