GeekSpawn Birthday Cakes

Cooking and Recipes DIY GeekMom

Cakerella I am not.  Duff Goldman I am not, either.  But I can dream, right?

Hopefully my stuff looks better than what CakeWrecks posts, though 🙂

After spending about $30 on my youngest son’s first birthday cake in 2006 (that didn’t even taste that good), I decreed that I needed to learn some cake decorating on my own and do it myself!

My youngest son's 1st Birthday cake. This cost us $25-30 and the icing tasted all metallic. These types of cakes typically cost $3-4 extra for the licensing fee for the name brand character. Photo: Patricia Vollmer

For my birthday in 2006, I asked my husband to give me cake decorating lessons.  This was a relatively inexpensive birthday gift, but the bigger gift was the TIME he gave me to take the 1-hour-per-week classes for 12 weeks.

I had a great time learning this new skill.  My husband enjoyed my taking the classes too, since he would take my “homework” into the office for everyone to enjoy.  I encourage anyone to give the class a shot!  I’m thrilled that I can make cakes and icing from scratch, great for when I used to invite my sister to the boys’ birthday parties when we lived closer together.  Her family doesn’t eat eggs, so I could make my own cakes with egg-replacer and keep the meringue powder out of the icing.

One of my "homework" cakes for my Wilton cake class in 2006. This one came with me to a Lutheran Women's Missionary League pot luck dinner. Photo: Patricia Vollmer

Having two sons, my cakes tend to lean towards sci-fi, transportation and sports themes, so I thought I’d share some of my geekier creations here.

All my more-unique cakes are posted to one of my favorite websites for finding decorating ideas: Cake Central.  This is where you can see my Diet Coke can-shaped cake for one of my former commanders (who kept an IV drip of Diet Coke on drill weekends), plus a photography-inspired birthday cake for one of my dearest friends.

Enjoy!

My first homemade birthday cake for my son from 2006. I guess I could have made Thomas's face a little less grey? Photo: Patricia Vollmer
I convinced my oldest son to do something other than trains in 2007. We had recently attended an airshow and he was on an Air Force jet kick at the time. Photo: Patricia Vollmer
One of my first fourays into fondant. I don't care for the stuff, especially if it's red or black. This was to celebrate my husband earning his PhD from North Carolina State University in 2008. Photo: Patricia Vollmer
My oldest son asked for a "Battle of Geonesis" cake for his 6th birthday. Really? It couldn't be a scene more obvious (and from the REAL Trilogy) like Endor or Tattooine? I had fun with those spray cans of icing color to make this orangey-colored desert landscape. You can see Mace Windu and Jengo Fett fighting over the candles. The 4 action figures were among my son's birthday gifts. Photo: Patricia Vollmer.
This isn't a birthday cake, but I can geek things up for other events, too! This is for my local American Meteorological Society chapter annual picnic. That's based off a real weather map; that "L" in the center dumped blizzard conditions on Omaha! Photo: Patricia Vollmer

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Share your own geeky cake designs on the GeekMom Flicker page!)

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10 thoughts on “GeekSpawn Birthday Cakes

  1. I also spent many years making Thomas cakes for my older son. His brother was even worse — you can’t exactly go down to the supermarket and pick a Woody Guthrie cake out of the sample book. (Just finding a photo I could copy in icing was tough — I ended up having to edit out his cigarette!)

    I don’t have a decent photo of the Woody Guthrie cake (to be fair, the kid DID make a cute Woodie Guthrie that Halloween), but I just added photos of one Thomas cake and my best cake(s) to date — the pair of pyramids I made for our Pyramid party. (There were two cakes because it was a joint party for both boys, whose birthdays are two weeks apart.) The directions came from Family Fun magazine; they had secret caches of foil-covered chocolates inside!

    1. Baking cakes is one of my favorite hobbies. I’ve baked tons of cakes in the past, but my favorite and geekiest cake to date was a full 3D TARDIS for my husbands 30th birthday. I even geeked it out with a working blue LED light for the top. It was early in my fondant work, but it was still tons of fun. I’ll post a pic on the flickr page.

  2. Nice Job! I love the weather cake the most! With four kids (three of them boys), we’ve had our string of interesting cakes too! Their favorites were the truck themed ones, where you create a construction scene using crushed cookies for dirt and rocks, and then add your own Hot Wheels. Always a crowd pleaser. 🙂

    Great post!

    Judy

  3. I had the same experience with a store-bought cake, and decided to make cakes from then on for my twins. I uploaded my two favorite pictures to the flickr group. I love how my pirate/hello kitty party theme turned out!

  4. I love it! And by the way, I deeply and sincerelyadmire the amount of rich, diverse and interesting post you manage to write! You’re my own WonderMum Role Model!

    1. Awwww…thanks for the kind compliments Delphine! I’m so proud to be part of the group, when I first read GeekMom.com last fall it was as if it was being written personally just for me!

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