So, it’s the summer of 1994. You’re expecting your first child with your fiancee, and you have two lovely step-daughters. The oldest one is about to turn five, and you want very much to make a good impression. What to do, what to do…

You march into Michael’s and buy every Wilton cake decorating gadget that you can find, that’s what you do.

Dad, Interrupted’s first Wilton cake was a dalmatian, which tied in nicely with his own dalmatian, Sadie. He sat in his little dining room and carefully squeezed in every frosting doohickey. Fun Fact: if you eat a cake with black food coloring, your teeth look awful for a long, long time.

And for a long time, DI’s cakes were A Thing. The pictures here are only a sample, and a tiny one at that.

DI wanted to make the cake where a doll wore a skirt, but he didn’t like the little plastic half dolls that you get in the Wilton section. So he bought full size Barbie Disney dolls, wrapped their lower torsos in protective Saran Wrap, and built a cake skirt that was themed with Snow White or whatever.

That cake up above that has a Barbie Mulan? That was just one of a string of Disney cakes, themed after whatever movie came out, and all featuring the real doll that a lucky little girl could keep. I can’t remember whose birthday featured Pocahontas, but that cake featured her striding across a cake landscape towards her pound cake dugout canoe. There was a Hercules/Megara cake with Greek columns, too.

One of the best ones was Sam’s Meteor Crater cake. We had just visited it on an epic road trip, and so DI created a masterpiece (take a flat cake, baked with a mixing bowl stuck in the middle to create the crater; frost with chocolate frosting, dust with chocolate powder, and use cut up candy bars to recreate the ejecta from the impact).

We covered Teletubbies, lots of Pooh-related fandom, and violated every copyright ever.

But it was delicious.

What the heck is she doing now?

© E. Stocking Evans 2016