Well, the cake turned out, uh, differently than I had imagined.

Some things went well. I think the side “heat sinks” came out pretty good. I used a Christmas cookie covered in green icing for the center “Xbox Jewel”. Tootsie Rolls became joystick ports, and SweetTarts became buttons. I didn’t worry about the colors — I wanted them to look like candy.

What went wrong. Well, for starters, I wasn’t able to find black shoestring licorice, which is what I had planned on using for much of the design. I ended up carving directly into the icing which, while it worked, wasn’t what I had planned. The other thing that went wrong was the white icing I bought. I had planned to write “XBOX” in white across the cookie and across the front to make it more authentic looking, but the white icing came out so sloppy that I had to scrap it. Susan saved the day by picking up some candy letters which I used. Had to buy two packs, of course (two “X”s).

The combination of the black icing and the camera flash makes the cake’s surface look a little funky, but for a quick job, it turned out okay. Most importantly, Mason thought it was “awesome,” and that’s good enough for me.