Balls--Lots of Tiny Balls

Last week my coworker Sharon commissioned me, likely against her better judgment, and possibly after much pleading on my part, to make the cake for her son's end-of-season baseball party. In my free time, when I'm not harassing the cat, harassing Lawyer Boy, or making fart jokes, I love to bake and decorate cakes. I've mostly been commissioned to make them for showers at the office, either bridal or baby, and frankly, I would like some credit for politely abstaining from writing "Way To Spawn!" on the cakes for the fetus-themed fetes.

Last summer, my girlfriends asked me to make a cake for our friend Erin's lingerie shower, and I obliged by baking up a full-figured corset, slathered in creamy frosting and practically bursting from real womanly curves, made possible by my mad skills in creating 3-D cake-boobs. I was so proud of her, my delectable lingerie, that I named her Tammy Sue. Seriously, can you blame me?
In case you're curious, "EK" would be Erin's new monogram after her wedding. It did not stand for "Extreme Kurves" or "Extra Klassy." Clearly I am not so fantastic at drawing with frosting, but I am extremely skilled at frosting rosettes, and also very enthusiastic about cramming as many of them into a given space as possible. Poor Tammy Sue apparently has chicken pox. Or, more appropriately, the herp.

This time around, Sharon had told me that her son's team was the Yankees, so I tried to work around that. I looked up the professional Yankees' team logo...
...and immediately nixed that as a design option. While it would be very authentic, it would more likely than not look like a big gum-paste penis sporting an Abe Lincoln top hat by the time I had recreated it, and no parent wants to explain that fumble to their 10-year-old son. And that just does not scream CELEBRATION, unless you are a patriotic porn star. I pondered the design some more, even contemplating borrowing the 3D boob effect from Tammy Sue to produce a 3D baseball, but I had to nix that idea after I determined it was impractical to make an entire batch of cake batter for one 3-inch-round ball. It was impractical, because I would have eaten the remaining cake in one sitting.

I finally decided to keep it simple and write "Yankees 2009" on top of a white cake, bordered by baseball stitching and blue dots. I know, it's simple, but the less I had to screw up, the less I could screw up. I frosted the cake smooth, piped a long border of blue dots around the bottom, and wrote the words across the top in a script similar to the logo, being careful to actually spell the words right. Sharon said she had dreamed before I gave her the cake that I had horribly misspelled YANKEES, which, knowing me, is a somewhat reasonable fear. I took extra precautions to ensure that I did not write YANKLES or YANKIES, because blue writing on a white cake is like giving birth--once it's out, you can't take it back. I carefully stitched red piping along the top of the cake for the baseball stitching, and I was done!


Because it's so cute, and because I know how much you're just dying for more glamour shots, here's a side view:I was so proud of myself, I just had to share with someone, and it was completely impossible for me to wait 26 more minutes before I would drop the cake off to Sharon. So I called my mom and squealed a lot.

"Mom, it turned out so well. It's so cute! And I didn't smear blue icing anywhere!"

"That's great!" she replied. "What does it look like?"

"Well," I wound up for my dramatic monologue. "It's white, and it says YANKEES 2009 in dark blue across the top, and then I used red frosting to stitch all around the top edge like a baseball, and then I bordered the entire bottom with blue balls. Oh God." I am what is known as an external processor, meaning things do not often fully register to me until I have said them out loud. Therefore, all the time I had spent conceptualizing "blue ball border" and then thinking "careful with the blue balls" as I had piped them onto the cake, it had not actually occurred to me that I was ringing a cake with blue balls. As soon as the words left my lips, though, I realized exactly what I had done.

"So you're giving blue balls to an entire baseball team?" Mom said. I could hear her starting to laugh, hard, at my blunder. "Way to go, Grace!"

Adding to my discomfort over my foul ball(s), when I dropped the cake off to Sharon, she had brought along her ten-year-old son, the Yankees player himself. He thought the cake was sooooo cool, which was extremely gratifying, until he said, "and look at the blue balls!" I could see Sharon's face over her son's head, and she was making that "do not laugh do not laugh your face can explode but you cannot laugh" face that moms are so good at.

In keeping with the baseball theme, do you think this was a home run, or a strike out?