The Cake

Parker's Bday party was today. Held at the Lawrence Hall of Science and was Marble Madness Workshop. I let Parker invite whoever he wanted up to the workshop limit and he picked about 8 kids from school and a few outside friends including both boys and girls.
A week or two ago, I thought we could do some kind of marble run themed cake. I did some poking on the internet, ask some friends, my sister and talked to Michael about it. I had some ideas, but Michael came up with using the Chaos tower with a cake and we stuck with that. He made up some prototypes over the last week and we made a practice cake a few days ago with bright red fondant. He learned a few things like we need a lot of fondant and frosting.



Then yesterday, we started to make the cake. I first made 3 13 x 2 yellow cakes (mixes) and we wrapped them and put them in the fridge. Then this morning, I made a bunch of buttercream frosting and started assembling them.




Michael did the cutting to make the cake slant down (to allow a marble to run down it.) He also cut a nice hole in the middle of the cake for the marble to drop through.



He then rolled and laid the white fondant on top. Not an easy part of the job. Then he started with the fondant marble runs in blue that go down the cake.




At this point, Michael was obsessed and pretty much worked on the cake solid for about 2 hours. Getting it just right. Testing the marble run. Adjusting it. Adding a 6 to it.

As you may be able to see, it has two routes. One that went on the top of the cake and one that went through the cake. Both routed back under the cake to the motorized elevator back to the top where it started again.

At the LHS, he set it up in the workshop room, I added some happy birthday candles, and he added some gumballs (that looked like marbles) to it and it was complete. The parents were impressed. Not sure if the kids noticed it.



Here it is in action:



And yes, we are both officially "those" crazy parents.