The Cake

Have I mentioned our favorite local artist, Karen Rycheck? She did the mosaic panels around our grill, turning an otherwise ordinary backyard feature into a Neoclassical art exhibit of an ancient Roman marketplace.

Then she (and her friend and co-artist Joe Dunbar, also of many artistic talents) painted our garage/theater. “Painted” is damning with faint praise; “transformed into the image of an ancient Roman temple” would be more like it. We regularly have people try to feel the “stonework”.

So, with the annual It’s A Wonderful Life party coming up, and having seen some of Karen’s regular cakes, we asked her to do the job. My instructions were: “I’d like a cake that looks like the house from the movie.”

Words do not suffice. Here is what she delivered:

For scale, the base of the cake is about 9×13. It’s a total of 5 layers of cake, two on each story and one for the attic. The entire cake, except for the pillars of the front porch and the bases under the top and attic stories, is edible. The detail is, as is often said but rarely meant so strongly as in this case, incredible. Here’s the tree from over the front porch:

Wow.

THANKS, KAREN!