The Little Prince

SWEET SOMETHING: So, you know how Facebook tracks your every keystroke and puts things in your feed that it knows will appeal to you? Well, a couple of weeks ago, out of 'nowhere,' a notice of something called an Edible Book Festival popped up in my feed.

It was being held by an arts council in the common space outside a huge, awesome bookstore about a half hour north of our place. The call was for entrants to make something edible based on a book. My first thought was, "That's really cool we should do that!" That thought was immediately followed by, "That's stupid, we have enough going on and that would take lots of time." 

I went back and forth on it for a couple of days and then, just minutes before the deadline, hopped onto the event's website and committed the kids to doing something for the event, figuring it would be good language arts and creative arts education, not to mention math (the baking).

And so, then the question was, what to do? Part of the contest was encouraging participants to be 'punny.' 

I Googled 'classic children's books,' and one title jumped off the screen at me immediately. I asked the kids how the felt about doing a cake based on The Little Prince, a classic by French aristocrat, writer, poet, and pioneering aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Naturally, the obvious pun there was replacing the original book's character with one Prince Rogers Nelson, or just "Prince" to most of the world. He, the diminutive rocker of "Purple Rain" and other fame.

The kids were all over that and so on Wednesday, they began work on their project. One of the first orders of business was building a little Prince. Below, Annabelle plays shoemaker. You can see the shirts and pants are already crafted.

Both of the kids worked on Prince heads. When you're doing something like this, you always want to have multiple body parts. Annabelle made six pairs of shoes, we had three pairs of pants, two shirts, three heads, extra hair parts. ...

It goes without saying, faces are always the hardest part.

 Here are a couple of reject heads!

CJ handled the bulk of the baking. After deciding on a purple velvet cake, the kids looked online for recipes. Because they'r experienced bakers, they have a good sense for what a recipe will taste like by looking at it. They selected a phenomenally-reviewed red velvet cake recipe from the New York Times. 

And as a nod to Prince's song "Raspberry Beret," the kids made a raspberry puree filling. It was SO, SO good! Here's the filling between the asteroid layers.

Getting the lettering right was tricky. The kids tried a few different techniques, including letters out of fondant. But, those looked like crap.

We couldn't help but eye the Cricut machine sitting on our dining room table. We had used sugar sheets before, and wondered if you could stick one of those into the machine for precision cutting, just like we cut designs from cardstock. Annabelle did the research and found out that it maybe might probably work.

And sure enough, it did!

They also used the machine to cut a medallion like the one on the front of "The Little Prince," and to cut some cool Prince symbols (representing that time frame where he used it instead of his name when he was in a battle with his record company).

On the medallion, Annabelle carefully wrote the first line from one of Prince's biggest hits, "Let's Go Crazy."  As people made the rounds at the show, the hardcore Prince fans saw that little detail and were SO happy. One woman even gave the kids high fives after reading it. :)

Below you see Prince parts, ready to make the trip up to Bothell, where the show was held.

Setting the cake up on site took about 45 minutes. The kids had to make repairs to the sheet cake layer, put the asteroid atop that, and then get Prince up on the asteroid.

 At 11 o'clock they were ready for the show!

As you can see in the photo below, their cake attracted a crowd! 

The kids stood next to their cake for two hours, answering dozens and dozens of questions about ingredients and techniques. They explained how they used gumpaste, fondant, buttercream, sugar sheets, and more. It was fun for them to get so much positive feedback following their hours of work. And they made it clear to those asking that they did, indeed, do the work themselves.

The kids' hard work paid off. Not only did they win a judge's award for "most book like," but they won the coveted People's Choice award.

After the awards ceremony, entrants cut up and served up their entries to share with the public. 

The kids' cake was so big, they had plenty to share. CJ was THRILLED that they had enough to bring some home. Below, he's ready to cut into the asteroid.

 Look at that lovely dark purple shade CJ made for the cake!

 The slice was a thing of beauty on the plate!

And I have to attest that the cake was So, SO GOOD! I don't even like cake, really, and this stuff was amazing! Great recipes, properly executed.

I also caught some snaps of a few other entries. I liked this "Eagle Has Landed" entry. It looked tasty!

 This gardening-themed entry was appealing.

The entry below won people's choice for adult entrants. The competitor even rewrote the book (upper left corner).

 This flower-themed entry was really pretty.

 And the cute cake below, "Little Mouse on the Berry," won an award, as well. 

 I loved "The Old Man and the Sea." It was very punny and well executed.

Some entries were super simple, like this one, below. I have to admit, though, I shuddered when people started dishing it up when it had been sitting at room temp for nearly three hours. #foodsafety

I loved the range of ages involved in the competition. This Quidditch ring was totally recognizable. 

 And there were many other clever entries from people of all ages. 

Following is CJ's recap of the endeavor. ... 

For about three days, I worked on, and assisted with, the making of a cake for the Edible Book Festival, hosted at the Third Place Books store in Shoreline. The contest involved making a cake based on a pun with a book's title. For our submission, my sister and I submitted a cake titled The Little Prince.

The Little Prince is an iconic French children's book about a boy who lived on an asteroid. However, our cake was a pun on that, replacing the titular prince with Prince Rogers Nelson (better known as just Prince), a famous musician.
I baked the purple velvet cakes used as the base for the decorations. I followed a New York Times red velvet cake recipe, slightly altered to be a purple velvet cake (as in the Prince album and song Purple Rain). The cake was double-layered (meaning I baked it twice using the same pan), with a raspberry pureé between the layers.

As the cover of The Little Prince features an asteroid, I used the same recipe to make the interior of the asteroid, which would be covered in fondant.

And below are Annabelle's impressions. ... 

Third Place Books, a local bookstore technically located in Third Place Commons, holds an annual event where members of the community bring in “edible books”- puns on book titles, represented by food. There are two categories- adult, and youth. Most submissions are cakes, but there are other fun puns and ideas too. This year’s event was very well organized, with around 3 or 4 dozen entries total. The categories for prizes were “Most Pun-derful”, “Most Book-like”, “Most visually Appealing”, and the “People’s Choice”, with 1 winner each from both the adult and the youth submissions.

The cake we submitted, “The Little Prince” featured an adaption of the original book cover with a spherical asteroid cake on top- however, in our rendition, the titular Prince was replaced with another Prince completely- Prince, the singer famous for songs like “Purple Rain”, “1999”, and “Let’s Go Crazy”. The cake took around 3 days to make, including baking (which CJ did most of) and making things like fondant and buttercream from scratch. The main focal point of the cake is a gum paste figure of Prince that we stood on top of the asteroid. It took a lot of tweaking, bad gum paste, and breaking of pieces, but he ended up making it to the end of the event safe and sound.

Some of my favorite submissions to the event were “Fork Diaries: How to Fork Your Diary” (“Dork Diaries: How to Dork Your Diary”, a DIY entry into the Dork Diaries book series), “Little Mouse on the Berry” (a cute pun of “Little House on the Prairie” with impressive homemade macaroons), and “Red E Layer One” (a riff on “Ready Player One”) in the youth category, and “Goodnight Buffoon” (“Goodnight Moon”, featuring a rewritten version appropriate to the United States’ 45^th president, who was featured scowling on the cake), “Hickory Daiquiri, Doc” (inspired by the classic “Hickory Dickory Dock” poem), and “Old Man and the ‘C’” (A beautifully crafted, obviously very time-intensive version of Ernest Hemingway’s “Old Man and the Sea”).

Most of the cakes I mentioned did end up winning awards, and ours actually won two (People’s Choice and Most Book-like)! Every winner got a certificate and $10 gift card to Third Place Books! The event is annual, and even a small treat has a great chance of winning if you do it right! Plus, even if you don’t enter, it’s extra fun to just come and look at some of the entries. Cakes aren’t the only accepted entries, either. So if you’ve got a favorite book or great pun in mind, give it a try! There may even be a similar event at a library or bookstore near you!