fenchurch | Rackham's birthday cake

Yesterday was

rackham's birthday... which he spent sleeping in and then mostly playing computer and Xbox games all day. Nice and lowkey. Today, however, was the party! Okay, nothing too wild since it's a work/school night; just a bunch of friends over, a lot of sitting around and chatting, and then a lot of eating. Rackham had made his (okay, Alton Brown's) cheesecake yesterday, and a few days ago we managed to find some fresh passionfruit for only a moderately horrible price (mmm... cheesecake and passionfruit... mmm...). We ended up not having enough candles, so Rackham poked a few holes in appropriate places in the cheesecake and stuck candles in the right spots and went with a binary candle arrangement for his age. Hey, it worked!

We originally weren't going to do a cake, but I came up with an absolutely perfect idea (the party's theme, as much as there was one, was Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (for an obvious reason I won't go into -- if you've read the books, you'll probably guess)).

mekle and

textualdeviance even came up with the perfect themed present: A bowl of petunias! Hee!!

I'm extraordinarily pleased with how well the cake came out, though, so I wanted to show it off (believe me, if it hadn't turned out, none of you would have ever heard about it).

I had been thinking about it the other day and realized that with a round cake, it would be really easy to do the guy from the bookcovers... except for the arms. And then it hit me... we own a Mr. Potatohead and he has arms... and voila! (Well, we also lashed them to some cheap wooden chopsticks using dental floss so that they'd be anchored in a bit better). Then it was just a matter of sketching in the mouth. If I'd been thinking ahead a bit better, I would have left some white icing to do some teeth. Ah well, maybe if I do this one again sometime.