Our "Max and Ruby" Cake

Pk is a huge fan of Rosemary Wells' Max and Ruby books and one of her all-time favourites is Bunny Cake. In the story, it's Grandma's birthday and Max and Ruby each try to make her a cake - Max makes an earthworm cake with red-hot-marshmallow squirters and Ruby makes an "angel surprise cake with raspberry fluff icing". Every single time we read this book (which is almost daily), Pk comments that Max's cake looks "yucky" and Ruby's cake looks "very yummy for Pk". I have had it in the back of my mind for a while that I wanted to make this cake for Pk, I was just looking for the right opportunity.

With our second child coming fairly soon, I am feeling like I want to do some really special things with Pk right now to make the most of our last bit of time as just us. It came to me with week - our wonderful, special, loving dog Chelsea was going to be celebrating her 9th birthday today and it would be the perfect chance to make the cake.

Pk is over the moon. The final results were o.k. - I think I did a fairly good job of coming up with a copy of Ruby's cake (even with the yellow roses!) but I am awfully glad that we weren't serving this cake to company - I knew the dog wouldn't complain! I used a cake mix (yes, after I said yesterday that we avoid refined and processed sugars and grains!) that ended up being very crumbly and while icing the top turned out o.k., the sides just crumbled and looked ridiculous. As my brother said, though, Ruby's cake in the book is lopsided, so it wouldn't have been right for the cake to be too perfect.

Needless to say, Pk LOVED it, the dog stole some (!) and now we have a new memory. I found a recipe online for Max's earthworm cake, too - we will have to try that in the future too!