Last week in the midst of my running from cheerleading to soccer to work to basketball to “parenting- high-school-student-how-to” meetings, I had a brilliant inspiration to make a special birthday cake for Jack.

Must have been all the extra time I had on my hands.

He LOVES Star Wars Legos and I decided I should make some kind of cake to go along with that theme. After all, he is the youngest… the last baby… why not do something really special just one more time?

I gleaned the internet for Star Wars Lego cake ideas. There are some beautiful cakes out there: spectacular life-like models of the Clone Wars Storm Troopers that fifth grade boys adore. Of course, there were no step by step directions to go along with those. Just the name and number of the professional cake decorators who are quite willing to provide said cake for your very spoiled child’s birthday party.

My kids are spoiled, but they don’t fall into the “My Super Sweet 16” spoiled category. Kroger and DQ are professional cake decorators in my mind. Their cakes will get devoured by hungry pre-teens just as quickly as a $300 masterpiece by the Cake Boss.

Regardless, I didn’t want to BUY a cake. I wanted to MAKE a cake. It’s just the mom thing to do.

So, after hours of fruitless web-surfing, I decided a simple Lego block-looking cake with some of Jack’s Lego guys sitting around it would have to suffice. Certainly that would only take an hour or so to bake and decorate.

I started on Wednesday and Thursday by visits to Michael’s, Meijer, Kroger, Giant Eagle, and JoAnn Fabrics. You wouldn’t want to get all of the ingredients and necessary equipment in one trip to one store. That takes all the fun out of it.

When all the kids were finally in bed around 11 on Thursday night, I baked the cake. That was the easy part. Duncan Hines, 97 cents at Meijer. Box cake tastes just as good as any from scratch that I’ve ever tried to bake.

Friday morning after I got all five of the kids off to their five respective schools, I started the decorating portion of the program. In my cake decorating internet education, I had read all about making the perfect icing, crumb coating, icing colors, and fondants. I felt fairly confident that I could make the icing from scratch and still be finished with the cake and get to work by eleven.

Sculpting Lego blocks and icing them was more of a challenge than I had expected.

I got to work at two.

The result was well worth the labor involved. … Right up to the point that Jack had a meltdown because his Lego men were “RUINED” by the icing! (Nothing a little hot water didn’t wash away… but Jack has taken lessons from the girls’ drama school.)