It’s Monday morning, 3:06am and I just woke up from a “nap”… refreshed and ready to start my um… day? The past few days have been absolute chaos. Caking from morning ’till night with forced “rest breaks” in between for food/stretches/youtube and going to bed at 5am… every single day! Eek! So not good for my body. My last cake this weekend was for a good friend’s son’s 1st birthday and I also got to attend his party as well. Have you been to a birthday celebration with 4x 1-year-old’s, 1x 2-year-old, 1x 9-month-old (nephew), 1x 4-year-old, and 1x 3-year-old (nephew)? Geez, just typing that out made me tired. It was buckets of fun. ACTUALLY, let me re-phrase that — have you been to a party with 8 kids under 4-years-old, CRAWLING/RUNNING around, with 12 adults chatting away while having a 9-month-old tubby nephew glued to your hip and getting mad at you because you aren’t feeding blueberries to him fast enough… while running on two hours of sleep?! It was… fun 
This is my new favourite cake (until I make my next one!). My friend was torn between a MONKEY cake and one that was a gigantic tire because her son loves to turn his cars upside down and play with the tires. When she proposed these two ideas to me a month ago, I wanted to make a monkey cake SO BADLY that I sent her telepathic messages for her to choose the monkey one. It worked!
YAY! Making a monkey cake was definitely on my “to do” list for 2012 and I’m so excited to cross it off and replace it with these pictures.
It is customary for the birthday boy/girl to have a mini SMASH cake to celebrate their first birthday which is a cake (4″x2″) reserved for them to smash/eat/smear on their faces, clothes and all available surface areas while their parents soak in the joyous moment/capture memories on their iPhones and clean up after them. I incorporated the smash cake on top of the main cake because the monkey digging into it and making a mess is just priceless
I had fun puncturing the cake and smearing chocolate bits all over the monkey’s face even though I was a bit nervous at first… after all, it was a one-shot deal! I had a mini freak-out moment when I got up this morning, opened the fridge and thought someone took a bite out of it! HAHA… silly me. Actually, someone did… BAD MONKEY!!
I had to make a few adjustments to make the cake “pop”. The mini cakes were actually VANILLA with strawberry buttercream but having vanilla crumbs wasn’t “messy” enough so I stuffed the little hole with chocolate cake bits because something about chocolate says naughty… don’t you think?
And YES, the monkey is sitting on a stack of tires. My original idea was to have a tree with a tire swing hanging from it and the monkey playfully bouncing all over it but at 4:30 in the morning, the last thing you want to think about is the structural integrity of a tree made of sugar, how to whimsically position the monkey so it looks like he’s actually having a good time while making sure he’s not heavy enough to pull the tree down thus destroying the cake that the maker (moi) so carefully designed and crafted. The maker will cry. That would have been funny though but not right away. Maybe later… like much, much later I can’t wait to post more pictures/videos! But until then… I’m going to get some more shut-eye.
Happy MONDAY, everyone!