As you read this, I'm on an airplane from San Francisco to Minneapolis, knitting something, drinking terrible wine, and changing DVDs every hour and a half or so. Then I'll ride in a minivan for two hours, at the end of which I'll tuck my kids, then myself, into bed at my in-laws' cabin in Wisconsin where I'll be spending the week. Jealous? You'll be even more so when you get a load of one of our family's favorite summer-at-the-lake traditions, the annual Lake Cake.
My sister-in-law Susan introduced this cake to the family when her daughters were just old enough to help decorate, and it's been on the menu every year since. It's just not summer until we find some new twist: Swedish fish to embed in the Jello lake, gummi inner tubes for the Teddy Grahams to float in, a replica of our floating swim dock made out of part of a candy bar, a graham cracker cabin. It's the summer version of decorating a gingerbread house, and we expect it will be something my nieces and my own girls will probably be orchestrating for their own kids in a couple of decades, when they'll hopefully be serving it on the deck at the same cabin.
The original recipe comes from Woman's Day and is presented as a layer cake, but in the interest of having more to decorate, we make it as a sheet cake. I have yet to eat a piece of "lake", but the rest of the family fights for those slices (*shudder*). It's ripe for variation—swimming pool, ocean, Mediterranean—blue Jello is incredibly versatile (*shudder again*).
