35: Pangwang (June 26th, 2011)

This penguin is not anatomically correct.

I should evaluate the reasons why every cake I make resembling a living creature always ends up looking like it was born with some sort of mental deficiency. Because this little guy is struggling. He looks completely confused.

The inspiration for this cake was that trip I took down memory lane a few weeks back, when I posted some old comics of mine in lieu of a cake update. In college, I did this comic called Poor Richard for the Uconn Daily Campus. I started freshman year, and submitted my first comic by taking a picture of my hand drawn strip and emailing it in the general direction of the editor. I wish I could say I have a copy of that original comic, but I don’t.

Poor Richard continued through my senior year, and my final strip was one for the ages:

Richard didn’t have any sort of strong character traits. He didn’t have any skills, and he wasn’t particularly funny. I didn’t create an origin, family members, or raison d’etres for Richard. He had one friend, an acorn named Diego, and looking back through my archives, I’m realizing that they weren’t even that close. Richard was an unfortunate soul, and the best I could come up with, comedy-wise, was shit like this:

Half the time, Richard wouldn’t even be in the comic. There was no sequential story, no major developments. He would lazily wander into a strip every once in a while, and I would allow it. He would go away for weeks at a time and I wouldn’t worry about him. He was easy to draw and seeing as he didn’t have many emotions, he was a cheap date in terms of emoting. So I thought I’d honor him with this cake. Because www.poorrichardcomics.com certainly hasn’t brought home any sort of bacon.

The comically large beak is made from Kellogg’s breakfast bars, because the schwanky-pants grocery store near my apartment doesn’t carry rice krispie treats. It worked out alright, I guess. I made the beak form, covered it in ganache, and then in orange fondant.

I find this picture to be hilarious, and I can’t quite put my finger on why:

In the end, nobody ate Richard. No, he sat on the kitchen table until people started to voice concerns about a potential bug infestation, at which point I stored Richard in a box in the corner of the room. Apparently this did not qualify as “taking care of the problem,” and Richard was way too old to eat, so I had to throw him out. But he did not go without a fight.