Cake by Numbers

Thursday, 4 September 2014

When Jett chose to have a birthday cake that was the same as the cakes presented in the popular game Minecraft I thought I had the easiest assignment in the world..especially as there were also some good example cakes to check out too..

I mean just look at it!  - The computer cake on the left is created out of chunky looking square pixels which would translate in an orderly fashion to square icing 'tiles' (see actual cake on right). Easy. Colour by numbers I tell you.

Well it would be, but when I returned (slightly fatigued) from my walks yesterday I quickly put the undercoat layer of icing on the cake so I could go ahead and finish it off with the outside tiles today. Only I didn't stop to think, I just did it.  Thus, this morning my cake looked like this:

Which is absolutely totally fine, except that a minecraft cake has a 14:8 width to height ratio.  And mine was well..um 22cm x 10cm. uh oh!  Compounding this was the fact that I only had one square cutter, and it was 2x2cm.  Of course I could have cut the tiles to any size with a knife, but aside from all the extra measuring I would have had to do,  icing can stretch while you cut it - so the tiles wouldn't have been uniform and no amount of resizing would fix the underlying ratio problem anyway.

So I needed to do calculations to work out what I could do with what I had, in order to re-create the essence (if not the entirety), of a minecraft cake..

Sheesh - and this was supposed to be easy! When I finally came up with a solution (11 squares x 5 squares with a pattern adjustment) I still had to colour 2 different browns, two different greys, and then cut all the tiles… gawd..

About an hour into the cutting, I realised that I'd have just about finished any other cake by now.. such as the pirate cake I did for Jett a few years ago..

So it turns out straight lines and rigid patterns are not helpful at all, they are a pain! Anyway - on I laboured, and after almost 2 hours I had completed the top of the cake..

Then I had to rush off to school to take Jett's extension maths class. Before I left I just had time to put together and print out a 'special' problem for them which went something like this (I've shortened it and removed the pics for your convenience).. 

q) I would like to make a minecraft cake that looks like this: [example pic] and I have a cutter that can make 2x2cm square icing tiles [example pic]. What size cake do I need to make ?

clever huh! It took them a while to work out how to solve the problem (i.e. count squares, times by two) - it's actually quite interesting what they are good at and not good at as a group but that's another story for another time.

Anyway - back at home I worked on the sides of the cake (another hour or so) -  there are 55 tiles on each side.

and then, because I'm a sucker for punishment I decided the cake board should be pixelated too, so the finished product looked like this - I ran out of green so I decided the visible edge of the board was a feature, not a bug.

So it turned out ok in the end. You can see bigger than desirable gaps between the tiles on the cake but I really couldn't do anything about it due to the required coverage.  I'm happy that the modified pattern still works - the kids haven't noticed that it's not exactly the real pattern (due once again to the incorrect ratio that I started with).  But it certainly took twice as long as a regular equivalent sized cake.  And given that my expectations where that it would take half as long as a regular cake, the reality was therefore four times longer! Actually that would make a good extension maths question..

q) Cathy sets out to make a straight forward cake in an hour. At the start she makes a mistake that results in the whole operation taking twice as long as it should have. Will she finish it in time to take Zali to her horse riding lesson which is  a fifteen minute drive away and when will she get time to do the shopping for Jett's party tomorrow?..

Home-Made

Friday, 30 August 2013

Over the last week, we have been making a soccer ball piñata for Jett's sleepover party tomorrow night. 

We've made a fish one before for Zali's underwater themed party, which was quite fun, so we thought we'd give it another go for Jett's. Only I didn't want his soccer ball to be balloon shaped so this time I started by cutting the the pentagons and hexagons out of a weetbix packet and sticking them all together so we had a proper soccer ball shaped base.

Then the kids did their paper mache stuff..

Followed by a coat of white paint..

Then a coat of black paint..

and now it's done.  We've filled it with Cadbury Favourites, put some rope through to hang it with, and it's just perfect. And cost nothing ! yay! 

Except for one tiny thing.   It's totally, completely, invincibly, indestructible.  The combination of starting with cardboard (rather than a balloon which is later popped and removed) and using flour and water as a glue has created an object which could safely be used to house small animals (meerkats may be too big) in a nuclear attack.   I can see that the only way this will be broken during tomorrow's party will be if we reverse over it in the car. 

This will obviously be disappointing for the bat-wielding, lolly hungry children however I can't help but think that this means we'll be able to use it for many parties to come - yay! 

Slave Labour

Sunday, 16 September 2012

It's handy having a partner in gross-ness for the party preparations..

Gross Ponderings

Sunday, 16 September 2012

Do you ever get the feeling you are being watched?

Maybe you hear whisperings around you..

but you just can't put you finger on where it is coming from..

It un-nerves you so much you start to grind your teeth..

and you delve deep into your brain for a solution..

in the end it drives you so crazy that your head just explodes completely..

 [the end]

Slumber Party!

Friday, 6 January 2012

It's 10pm and the house is settling down to the soothing sounds of summer tennis (yay!) and the giggling of Zali and her friends  in her bedroom - punctuated with the occasional mystery thump.  

Compared to the BBQ we held earlier in the week for Jett and what felt like 1 billion of his marauding friends this has been very civilised party so far, except perhaps for the beating of the fish piñata in the games room. I'm normally not keen on pinatas but as Zali really wanted one and was willing to make her own (which we've been working on since we got back from SA) I've relented. It turned out really well and everyone got a few good thumps in before it burst into pieces. 

Creepy

Monday, 13 December 2010

Nope this isn't the arachnid display at the museum, these are the invitations to Zali's Spooky party, lined up ready to be delivered. The magnets(hot glued) onto the spiders were handy so we could arrange them on the fridge in the same order as her school photo to make sure we hadn't missed anyone.   The tags were made out of old manilla folders, printed with the details. Then I put the holes in them with those rivet thingies which we had on hand from some other project.  Then some ye-olde-style string and presto - creepy invites I'm sure you'll agree. 

Pirate Iconology

Friday, 10 September 2010

Treasure chest : Check, Map: Check, Eyepatch: Check, Skull and Crossbones: Check, Sword through Cake: Check...   This is actually my first ever pirate cake and I'm pretty happy with it.  Jett chose the colour scheme and told me which bits of cakes he liked from a selection of googled cakes.  I did have to persuade him to let me use red on the cake as well as the blue is almost a bit dowdy for my liking..