Peeps Cake!!

This 4-storey cake is strawberry and vanilla checkerboard cake with whipped vanilla icing and 38 peeps decorating the outer surface. Lindsey of hungry eyes fame hosted an amazing Easter dinner party and this was my contribution...

The cake is leaning slightly.. mostly because of my inaccurate top-cutting technique to flatten each layer before adding the next. I hacked at it with a bread knife, eyeballing how straight the cut was. The cake was finished by 1PM, and the party was at 4. By 2, the cake was leaning dangerously.. so much so that I devised a plan to insert a chopstick or skewer through it to hold it steady. I didn't have any of either on hand.. but I had a straight plastic straw from subway. The unwrapped straw was a bit flimsy.. but I poked it straight through the center of the cake, and I credit the brave little subway straw for maintaining the cake integrity until after dinner...at which time the great peeps cake massacre began.. and my oh my, what a glorious massacre it was!