The comic book cake

The comic book cake kind of happened like so...

A couple of years ago...
Patrick and I were at the Williams Sonoma Store in the mall.

Patrick: "Look at these Star Wars and Avengers cookie cutters! Can we get these and make the cookies for my dad's birthday? My dad is a big marvel comics fan!"

Me: "Yeah those are cool! We could make a whole cake for his birthday and I can decorate it with the avengers cookies!"

I had taken a basic cake decoration class with a good friend a few months before. My cake fell apart during that class. The cake was still somewhat unleveled/lopsided even after they taught us how to level a cake.  Despite all of that the class somehow made me feel like I was a some master chef that could take on the world. I was dreaming up this two tiered comic book super hero cake in my head!

This is what my first cake looked like at the cake basics class...

The cookie cutters stayed hidden away in the cabinet as the months passed by.  Then all of a sudden the month of May rolls around. The weeks of Patrick's Dad's Birthday was suddenly upon me. I decided to go buy some pre-made store bought sugar cookie dough. I was only interested in the decorating part of this whole dream cake.  I was thinking to myself,  "how hard can this be?" I had been researching royal icing online. I thought it would be a quick thing to do and whip up. Also they had let us use pre-made cakes in our decorating class.  I thought I would just buy a box cake mix whip it up too! Easy Peasy...right???

I will be the first one to tell you this was not as easy of an endeavor as I had planed. First off the store bought cookie dough didn't work at all. The cookies did not hold there shape and looked less than superhero material and more like shapeless mutants. I did some research online and read that the store bought cookie dough would not work with these cutters because it has too much leavening agent in it. So much for making cookies that day because I was all out of time. The next day I followed the recipe that came in the box of cookie cutters. I don't remember how long it had to chill for but it was a while...so the cookies didn't get made that day either and somehow I ran out of time to experiment with royal icing. I found myself at Michael's craft store buying Wilton candy melts out of desperation for something foolproof and tasty to ice the cookies with. The Wilton candy melts worked well but had to be reheated often so the the process took a little time. I was still baking the actual cake from the box mix, and I had to recruit Patrick who was playing video games to ice the cookies. He was unsure about it at first but he did an awesome job. The cake came out pleasing. I didn't use a crusting buttercream at the time and could not get my icing smooth so again I cheated and used wilton sugar sheets to wrap the cake where the icing was not smooth. I cut out some comic book graphics to put on top of the cake with lollypop sticks. The finished cake was well received and got many compliments!