Schoolhouse Rock cake

My little friend Isaac loves numbers, so for his eighth birthday we decided he should have a cake based on My Hero Zero from Schoolhouse Rock.

It was a really small, casual party at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, so I wanted the cake to be both entirely edible and convenient to eat without utensils. Each number was an individual cylinder of cake. I made the tubes, as well as the numbers, out of gum paste, then filled them with alternating layers of orange cake, milk chocolate ganache, and ginger cookies. The ginger cookies were structural, since the gum paste couldn’t bear the weight of seven layers of cake cylinders plus the gum paste figure.

To make the figure on top of the cake entirely edible, I reinforced the gum paste with an armature of uncooked spaghetti. I send my brother-in-law to the store to get the spaghetti. He evidently read every box of spaghetti in the store to find the one with the longest cooking time, under the theory that a longer cooking time would indicate sturdier pasta.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Isaac as happy as when he saw this cake, and he’s generally a happy guy. I love making cakes because cakes make everyone happy. This one has to rank amongst the most gratifying cakes I’ve ever made.