We’ve all met people who seem to have done it all. Somehow, while we were resolutely plodding along, they learned to fly a helicopter, got a medical degree, and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro (twice). To quote Tom Lehrer, “It’s people like that who make you realize how little you’ve accomplished. It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.”
You wouldn’t think a doctor, a helicopter and Africa’s highest mountain would be natural cake mates. When I first imagined Kilimanjaro (The customer kept calling it Kili, but the mountain and I are never going to be on a nickname footing.), I pictured the summit as jagged and forbidding. Something like Mount Everest. (Have you read Into Thin Air about an expedition to Everest? It’s simultaneously fascinating and horrifying.) But I found that actually, at its peak, Kilimanjaro is quite flat.
Why, it’s the perfect place to land a helicopter. Speaking from my own mountaineering experience, when I climbed Masada (twice), I can tell you I would have been thrilled with a helicopter ride back down!
The helicopter was actually the most difficult part of this project. Considering its sizable bulk, you’d expect the legs of a real helicopter to be more substantial. Although, take a look at a cow or a horse and that theory goes out the window. Fondant legs, even dried and hardened, were never going to support a helicopter body. The solution that I settled on was to build the helicopter in advance on a mound of RKT (Rice Krispies Treats). The mound would support the body, and the legs would straddle the mound and carry no weight at all. After I added the mound and its helicopter to the top of the mountain, I covered all the pieces in snow to achieve a seamless peak.
One of the guests at the party created an interactive rotatable 3D photo of the cake. The helicopter somehow came out a little worse for wear in the photo. But it’s cool to be able to see the cake from every angle – even, perplexingly, from below.
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