_this Threadless t-shirt fansite for cake designs based off Threadless tees. The winner gets a 12 shirt club subscription, so I decided to devote part of my Saturday to the pursuit of the winning cake design. Here be me account it :D!

First, I decided to base my cake off Pure Imagination, both because I actually own it and because I thought it might translate into a really cool cake.


So I set to work! Baking a chocolate cake with two 8 inch pans in my family's crappy mini oven. It mostly went well except for some weirdness due to the crappiness of the oven and for some half-frozen eggs.
Then I turned on the boob tube (nothing on but Instant Pageant Star or whatever, on Style) and made four circular cuts in the cake for legs (for I had decided to use the Elephant from the shirt as my main character). Drawing the design onto a cake would have been much simpler, and more within my comfort zone, but I wanted to try something new.


Oh, I was so glad that the camera worked! Keep in mind that I was using my brother's low quality (but much appreciated, bro!), battery-guzzling Sony with no rechargable batteries and absolutely no other working AA's in the house. I was afraid that each photo would be my last :P.

Anyway, from there I took these two chicks into surgery for the all-important shadow-puppet hand accesories.

(don't worry, I specifically chose these girls because their joints are of the cheap, pop-on-pop-off variety).

At this point, I was feeling pretty darn good about myself. Hey, it was really starting to look like something!





A kind of scary something, but I could see an elephant with giant hands for a face in there somewhere!

But then, I had to take a break. My Dad was out and I needed him to go get the food coloring he'd neglected to get the day before when I asked ("Food Coloring?!" He acted like he'd never heard of such a thing).

So cakie went in the fridge...


...and I went off to work on some art for a few hours.


(ja, I'm wondering what happened to the 5 o' clock hour, too)

At last! Food coloring!


Here's where all the paint mixing skillz come in handy:


Here, however, is also where things start getting a little messy. We don't have any professional icing bags around the house anymore, and all the Ziplocs were used up the other day, so I was stuck trying to use a couple of dollar store bags.

They didn't work out so well.


Icing was all over everything but I persevered, though it took an amazingly long time to do without the whole thing falling apart in my kitchen, which was steadily getting warmer as my Dad cooked spaghetti and watched Open Range on AMC for the millionth time. (I'm serious, I don't even like the movie but I can quote parts by heart: "Well, God, you got yourself a good man and a good dog. Ol' Tick wouldn't even catch rabbits in the end... And I'm inclined to be holdin' a grudge against you like Boss said. I guess that means 'Amen.'")

(not my booze in the background, obviously :P)

I mixed the green...


...Tried to cool it down again...


...and finally, attempted to make swirly patterns around the base of the Elephant,but ended up with more of a border instead.

(Dad's a serious movie watcher :{|)

Then, because it was getting pretty late (and Open Range was over)and the icing bags were clearly not working, I got out some pipe cleaners in to mimic the shirt's swirly textures and to add more bright colors!


Okay, so maybe it's not what I originally concieved (THE MOST AWESOMEST CAKE BASED OFF A T-SHIRT EVERRRRR!), but I still think it turned out pretty cool:


I tried my darndest, learned a bit about myself, and got to have spaghetti and cake for dinner.


And for now, that's a pretty cool accomplishment.