Midieval Cake Auction

We spent the weekend working on some projects with the boys. One was the Cake Auction for Cub Scouts. The theme that the whole pack voted on was "Midieval." My boys were thrilled with his theme. They love knights, swords, dragons, and such.

M and I looked up different cake designs online (what did we used to do without the internet?) We found an awesome idea for a dragon using home-made Rice Krispies Treats to mold into a dragon. We ran the ideas by both boys and were able to convince R that he would love that for his cake (he's easier to persuade than his younger brother.) T wouldn't go for the dragon cake because he had his heart set on a catapult. Yes, that's right, a cake with a catapult on it. Of course, I let M engineer that one.

First, I helped each boy make a cake. T made a chocolate one and R made a yellow butter cake. We decided that both cakes should be "castle grey." I remembered seeing black food coloring in the store at Halloween time, so we got some of that and put a few drops in the frosting.

T carefully frosted his cake, which was going to be a fort with a catapult in it.

M and R made the Rice Krispies Treat mixture and we added lots of green food coloring to it. After spraying his hand with Pam, R molded the dragon onto the parchment paper with the sketched out dragon on it. This process worked really well. (I don't think that he liked the texture at first, but he got used to it.)

He got the hang of it. It was tricky timing. You had to work with the mixure after it had cooled off a bit so it would hold together, but before it got too cool and wouldn't be maleable anymore.

The end result was a pretty good looking dragon. It's sitting here waiting to cool and harden before being decorated with fondit scales, eyes, teeth, tongue, and claws. (I was scared to make and work with fondit, but M found a recipe that seemed easy enough, so I did it and it worked pretty well.)

Then it was T's turn to make his Rice Krispies Treat mixure (and dye it brown) for the base of the catapult (or "cannonpult" as T insists upon saying despite repeated pronunciation lessons from his well-meaning mother.)

The best part about working with Rice Krispies Treats is tasting the mixture. T and M made the entire catapult out of Rice Krispies Treats on Saturday, only to have Mackinaw eat the whole thing while we were taking a nap. So, M rebuild it (with modifications using Kelloggs Cereal Straws) on Sunday. Somehow I don't have pictures of the work in progress (perhaps due to the stress of the untimely demise of the first catapult or perhaps due to the stress of wondering if the dog was going to live another day...) But, see below for the best catapult cake (throwing fire balls) that you've ever seen in your life.
Sunday evening was the actual cake auction. Each boy stood up and explained what his cake was and how he made it. Then the bidding began. The deal was that bids could only go up to $15 and if the boy (and his family) wanted to buy the cake back, they could for $1 more than the highest bid. I had fun running the bid up on cakes that I knew that families were going to buy back. You should have seen R and T's faces when they saw me bidding for cake after cake -- Mom, are we going to take ALL those cakes home? or you should have seen my face when R tried to outbid me on a cake that we did cake home. I had to explain to him, "when Mommy bids $10, you don't bid $11, okay?" It was a lot of fun! We bought back T's cake and also a little boy's cake that nobody else was bidding on -- I felt sorry for him and bought it for ten bucks.

Here's T standing proudly with his catapult cake. You'll see there are brownie pieces decorating the outside of the cake -- T loved this real castle look. (Also notice the really long cake behind T. That's an excalibur sword cake -- pretty cool.)

R is posing like a dragon near his dragon cake. He described it as "a fire breathing dragon on a rocky surface using Rice Krispies Treats and fondut for the dragon."

The Cub Scouts had a goal of raising $160 for the night and they surpasssed it, raising $240. As a reward, each Scout was given one water balloon and at the count of three, they each threw their balloon at their den leader. What a blast! M brought a change of clothes just in case, but he didn't get wet. Three balloons hit him, bounced off, and broke on the grass (much to the disappointment of his little Tiger Cubs.) All in all, it was a fun activity :>

M passed out the water balloons to the excited boys, thrilled at the chance to get their den leaders wet.