Sometimes desperation leads to inspiration

Sometimes inspiration comes from funny places and in little bits at a time. That was the lesson I learned on my most recent cake adventure.

In the middle of post-truck cake exhaustion, it's my mom's birthday. For just about anyone else, I'd have found some way to have someone else make or buy a cake, but it's my mom. What else could I do but make her the chocolate cake that she requested? And really, we're not talking just make a cake and slap some icing on it either. It's my mom and it needs to be special just like she is. But my brain feels like all creativity and potential inspiration have been, well, shall we say run over by a large truck ... that seems about right.

You need to know that my mom collects miniature watering cans. A few weeks before i had picked up a cute little bird holdings blue watering can that I'd planned to wrap up since she already knew about the Riverdance tickets that I'd bought. When still desperately seeking inspiration on the morning of my mom's birthday, I decided that the bird could go on top of the cake in a little nest. It seemed like a good idea that couldn't be too hard to execute.

Time and energy were running short so I quickly ditched the idea of baking my own perfectly shaped macaroon nest and went for picking up some store bought chocolate drizzled macaroons that I knew were soft enough to be shaped a bit and formed into a nest on top of the cake I'd already iced with white buttercream. If you're thinking I may have made a critical error in icing color, you'd be totally correct.

They say necessity is the mother of invention, well apparently it's also the mother of inspiration. The bird's nest looked, well, silly on the white icing. I didn't have enough icing made to re-ice the cake brown to make it look like a tree trunk which would have been the best "thinking ahead" original choice. But I did have enough that I could make some brown and green to make a tree branch across the top of the cake.

I piped the branch and some bonus twigs, started to add some green leaves but it still wasn't looking right. Now the it wasn't just the nest floating on a sea of white, the branch was just laying around with no context. Oh did I mention that my mom was sitting watching TV in the family room attached to the kitchen and she picked that moment to turn around and ask how things were going. Talk about needing to have my brief moments of panic be very quiet along the way.

Next solution, add a tree trunk down one side of the cake and finish adding the leaves, all while keeping my fingers crossed that this was going to be enough. I wrapped the bird's little feet and bottom with plastic wrap since I couldn't guarantee food safety and placed him on the cake thinking that I had no more ideas left and still wasn't convinced it was going to look right.

Much to my surprise, lo and behold, while I wasn't paying attention a rather cute cake emerged that seemed just right. I wish I'd taken pictures along the way when I was panicking because looking at the finished cake makes my stress seem silly. You'd almost think I knew what I was doing when I started... Nope! But thankfully, sometimes it all works out the way it should even when you've totally failed in the planning part.