Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects and Activities for Dads and Kids to Share (13 page)

4. Start construction with the main church building. Since you’ll want to stack the cakes, you will need to trim the tops off flat. It’s easiest to use an electric carving knife, but a large bread knife works well, too.

5. Stack three cakes, putting a layer of frosting in between each one as a form of glue. With all the cakes stacked, you have a good basic building shape.

6. For the arched top of the church, set the last cake on top, with a layer of icing between it and the third layer. With your knife, trim it into a triangular prism with the high point at the center, tapering off to nothing at the long sides.

7. Next comes your first go-about with fondant. It’s an interesting material, like a sugar-based clay that will harden stiff after a day or two. When you start, though, you can roll it out like pie dough—and that’s just about how to treat it. For this purpose, you want to roll out a batch (make sure you buy it by the bucket; you can find it at your local craft or baking supply store), getting it down to about ⅛-inch thick and big enough to lay over the church building.

8. You and your kids will need to move it together and lay it on, very carefully. Once it’s on, you can poke and prod it with your fingers and/or small tools (a clay modeling tool works, or even a dull butter knife is good) to get it to fit over the shape. Then smooth it out with your hands until you’re happy with the fit and coverage, and trim it at the base. When you’re done, it should look very much like white-washed adobe or stucco.

9. The rest is detail work. You can make the sides of the garden and steeple out of rice treats by cutting the approximate shapes out of the pans and then hand-molding and covering in fondant.

10. You can make bushes and trees around the building with rice treats as well, and color them green or brown by painting (or airbrushing) them with food coloring.

This is a very specific example, and if you live outside of California, it may not be quite as compelling a project. However, these materials and methods can be applied to almost any model-building project you can think of, either for school or fun (especially if you want to make an
Ace of Cakes
-style surprise for someone). It’s up to you and your kids to use your imagination.

T
here are very few things cooler to younger kids than pirates (well, maybe ninjas, but that’s an age-old conflict we do not wish to delve into here). Even before Johnny Depp’s high-profile contribution to the mythology, kids have loved playing pirate since Long John Silver leapt off Stevenson’s pages. And as parents, we love helping our kids use their imaginations. We buy our kids eye patches and plastic swords to play pirate dress-up, or we throw them a pirate-themed party. But maybe the coolest way to immerse kids in imaginative pirate play is to set up a treasure hunt. And what does any good treasure hunt need first? Why, a map, of course! And mapmaking most certainly qualifies as a geeky endeavor, whether it be for a pirate party or an adventure campaign.

First, you need to create your canvas. If possible, find a paper bag with nothing printed on it. If that’s impossible, just use the inside of the bag, which should be blank. To get the largest starting piece out of one back, use scissors or a mat knife to cut away the rectangular bottom of the bag. Then cut up the single seam on the side of the bag. You should be left with a 17-by-38-inch sheet of coarse brown paper.