SpongeBob SquarePants Birthday Cake

Betty Crocker sent me several boxes of cake and frosting and I really wanted to put them to good use. I do bake cakes, don't get me wrong, but I don't do *theme* cakes. I mean, Kroger (or Sam's because they are cheaper) was good enough for me. But, you know, I'm trying to stretch my domestic abilities this year and this was something I wanted to try so I did appreciate the goodies from Betty Crocker!

Anyhoo – as I mentioned, Caleb turned 5. Well, I thought it would be adventurous to make him a theme cake. When I asked him weeks ago what kind of cake theme he wanted, he said Sponge Bob. OK, he's square, I thought I could pull that one off. After some searching, my preparation turned into the cake above :)

I know, he doesn't have arms, but he's a sponge and can magically grow them I'm sure :-)

I made two cakes, consisting of 3 boxes of cake mix for this. Two boxes of vanilla for his body, and 1 box of chocolate to use for part of his brown pants. After I was done baking the cakes, I wrapped them up and stuck them in the freezer to get it hard so it didn't crumble when I iced it. I always see all those fancy cake makers doing this and it really works.

So, I just cut 1/4 of the cake off with the vanilla to make his yellow body. Then, I cut 1/4 of the chocolate cake and placed it under his body for his pants. Talk about creativity! I really felt like those cake artists on tv – the cake was my canvas :-)

With his face, I think it turned out OK. I wasn't happy with his nose – it looks more like Squidward's, actually. I used chocolate icing to free hand the outline for his face (and his pants are just chocolate icing too). Then I filled in the other stuff with icing.

The blue in his eye is actually just a round blue piece of paper (I had blue airheads but they were eaten by an older monster brother). The pupil is a rolo cut in half. His teeth are just pieces of gum. His tie is an airhead cut to that shape. His legs are twinkies. His shoes are ho-hos. And, those snazzy socks are just icing with the other colors piped on.

Oh, and I don't have any fancy icing bags (or whatever they're called). I just put my icing in a Ziploc baggie and snipped a small corner off the end to pipe it on. I had some piping pieces but they didn't work with my Ziploc bags.

The other noteworthy thing is the box. You know the nice thing about purchasing your cake is that you have the plastic box to keep it from getting hard. Well, I just used a large clothes box from a Christmas present. It was the perfect idea, I think. And, it worked :-)

So, there ya have it. As I was working on the cake, I was telling myself it was crazy, I couldn't believe I was doing this. I started analyzing my time/cost and how much it was actually costing me to make it. But, then Caleb came in when it was almost finished and said, “Mom, my cake looks good.” He was smiling and so happy about this cake. That made it worth it to me and I'll probably do more in the future even if it takes me longer – that smile was a perfect reward!