Decorated Cakes

It's a pretty wonderful thing to be a kid in the mid-1970s with a mother who can make cakes like this:

(As I write this, Easter 2020 is less than three weeks away, though the wisdom of the usual Easter festivities right now seems in doubt, given the coronavirus pandemic and the social distancing and stay-at-home orders with which we've been living for the past couple of weeks. Maybe I can convince Anna and the girls to recreate the above cake for us this year anyway.)

Mom took a cake decorating class sometime around (I'm guessing) 1975, I think at Sears of all places. Maybe it wasn't Sears; that doesn't matter, what matters is that I remember being amazed that my mother could make these beautiful cakes, which in my memory she was doing almost constantly, for every occasion, such as the one above, which must have been an Easter cake, probably around 1976, and this one:

If you can't tell, it's a Scooby-Doo cake, and must have been for Jeff's birthday, which apparently we celebrated (at least in part) at my grandmother's house in Tucker (where this picture was taken). (And oh how I wish I could remove my ridiculous grinning self from this picture, but I don't want to misrepresent my past, and plus also I remember the navy winter coat I'm wearing here, with its fur-lined hood, with an indefensible fondness. One year I wore it as my Trick-or-Treating costume; I zipped it all the way up and said I was an Eskimo. But I digress...)

Until I found the picture below, I remembered this one as a Scooby-Doo cake; I must have been conflating it in my mind with the one above. I remember Mom meticulously decorating Yogi Bear with frosting stars applied with a piping bag and tip:

I'm happy that my daughters continue the baking tradition. In fact, after I click Publish on this post, I'm going to eat a piece of the Oeey-Gooey Butter Cake that Elyse made for us tonight. It's not decorated, but I'm excited about it nonetheless.