My Scout Got Artsy Fartsy

As part of cub scout pack meeting last night, Loch Monster had to make and decorate a cake. He could have help making the cake but he had to do the decorating. He simply wanted to make a regular ole cake in a 9 x 13 pan, frost it and put sprinkles on it. That just wasn't going to cut it for me. "You don't want a rocket or a car or a football or whatever?" So we thought about it and we came up with a chess board. Loch Monster loves to play chess.

But now that we have this cool idea and the cake is baked and assembled, ready to frost when Loch Monster gets home from school, we have a problem. Loch Monster's chess pieces have felt on the bottom. My chess pieces have felt on the bottom. Felt bottoms and frosting don't mix. So Dad, the thinker, suggests to me that the pieces can be made out of Legos. BRILLIANT!!!

I picked up the kids from school and set Loch Monster to work at creating chess pieces. His imagination went wild. His first piece that he came to show me was about 4 bricks high and 4-2x3 bricks wide. Way, way too big for our chess board. I think he was kind of bugged that we didn't have a huge chess board that would allow him to be creative and large with his creations. "How creative can you be with restrictions of nothing bigger than a 2x2 brick? I mean, come on, mom!" (I know that is what he was thinking.) But he did it. I helped a teeny teeny bit to steer him in the right sized direction but he designed the pieces. Super easy to make the pawns be just the 2x2 bricks and we made the king and queen out of real Lego men but with chef's hats for the queens and construction hats for the kings. And then we just pilfered through his thousands of Legos to find interesting pieces to help him build rooks, bishops and knights.

I decorated one row across and one row down to start the checkerboard pattern and then Loch Monster filled in the rest. We were down to the wire and only had 15 minutes left before we needed to be at the church so he piped the white stars on the border and I piped the brown ones. Then we each assembled our own side of the chess board and off we went to pack meeting. He got the award for the Smartest Cake. And the reward of licking frosting out of his Legos. :-) (If you click on the picture of the cake, you can see a bigger image for a better view of his pieces.)