Whole Lot of Caking Going On

My friend Janae and her kids are living out of suitcases at various friends' houses, waiting for the school year to be over so they can join her husband/their dad in Utah. She volunteered to make a graduation cake for the son of one of the friends she is enjoying the hospitality of, before she remembered all her cake decorating paraphernalia is already in Utah. I have cake decorating paraphernalia to spare, so she came over Friday night and made it at my house:

(The picture is small because it's just a trifle blurry.)

Since the cake decorating stuff was all out, and Audrey loves to dabble in the frosting arts (or maybe it's just Audrey loves to dabble in frosting,) she wanted to make cake, too. So she did, and quite nicely, too, I think:

Following a field trip to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, Audrey and her friends split up a package of plastic dinosaurs from the museum gift shop,which they now have named, given personalities, and take everywhere they go. They have even started a web page dedicated to them at http://www.freewebs.com/dinoclubhouse to post pictures of their dinosaur exploits (though there isn't much there yet.) So following a brief Hello Kitty phase, she is currently dino-obsessed. Since it's a little early for James' birthday, and James is more of an armadillo or dragon kind of guy, Aurey decided the dinosaur cake could honor Father's Day, complete with one (relighting) candle for every year of John's fatherhood.

After the completion of the cake, Audrey and I went shopping for a bit, and when we returned John met us at the door with bad news. There had been a dog related cake incident, and the cake now looked like this:

Sigh. The dogs were already in the proverbial doghouse for a prolonged deer-chasing incident earlier in the day. Fortunately Audrey had a sackful of new clothes, lip gloss and hair thingies to soothe her wounded spirit.

Cake Post Script (Later in Day of Posting)

Oh dear.

John and I were dutifully going to try to find a little bit of un-dogged cake to taste, to make Audrey feel better. We put it in the oven to keep it safe from the dogs, AND. . . you guessed it:

I turned the oven on to preheat.