Take a Byte Out of THIS Laptop - June 2007

I made this laptop cake for my dad for Father's Day.  My dad does a lot of video editing, and he is really good at it.  He has a computer that he uses, but he also uses his laptop; so I thought that it would be neat to make a laptop cake for him.  I wanted it to be a surprise, so I covertly asked my mom what type of laptop and video software program my dad had. :) Then I looked online to find pictures of the type of laptop he had to try and make it look like his did.

Below are some pictures of my dad's laptop next to the cake laptop.

[My dad having some fun 'typing' on his cake.  :) ]

The cake was an 8x8 inch square cake sliced in half and opened like a laptop.  My original idea was just to hold the top open by propping the board it was on up with some skewers, but as I went along I quickly found that it was not going to hold.  So, I ended up constructing the box behind it and attaching that to the base so it wouldn't slide from the weight of the top cake resting on it.  It was a bit bulkier and more conspicuous than I wanted, but it kept the top in place which was the most important thing... whew!  :)

Some of the details, like the speakers, CD drive, ports, etc are just painted with food coloring straight onto the icing.  The other details, like the keyboard, power button, touchpad, etc are made out of fondant that I then painted onto with black food coloring.

The actual screen is a piece of card stock paper that I printed on from a regular printer and put on top of the cake; then I laid a clear sheet of plastic (like a transparency sheet) over the paper to give it the 'shine' and look of a screen.  So, of course those two things are not edible.  :)  (There was also clear sheet of plastic behind the card stock so the icing didn't bleed through the paper.)

I wanted it to look like he was working on a project, so, I needed to have certain elements on the screen for the 'video editing' aspect (the two bottom sections).  I found a screen shot online of a editing program that looked like his and copied and edited the elements I needed into a Word document.  Then I composed the rest of the screen and added in pictures to make it look like he was in the process of creating a slideshow with his editing program.

The title of the slideshow is 'Great Fathers'.  I put a picture of my dad, my two sisters, and me when we were little kids in the 'slideshow preview' window, and then in the 'pictures to be added to slideshow' section I put a picture of my dad, my sisters, and me that we had taken the previous Father's Day.  In that section I also put a picture of my dad's dad (my Grandpa John), my mom's dad (my Grandpa Joe), and my husband, Ronnie.

Well when my dad saw the cake he was really surprised!  He thought it was very cool, and he thought it was really neat that the video editing stuff was on the screen (it was one of his favorite parts). He also really liked seeing the pictures that were included for the 'slideshow'.  Later, though, the laptop crashed... because we ate it!  :)