5 days after Neven and I released The Incident onto the world, I decided that it was time to get serious and make Big Bucket Software my full time gig. Resigning is never easy. I actually used the line, “we have to talk.”

At least I didn’t have to confess that I’d been secretly interviewing for a better position or anything like that; just about everybody at the office knew about The Incident and knew that it was doing good things in the App Store charts. It was finally time for me to take the leap into self-employement and my colleagues understood.

In Australia, employees are required to give 4 weeks notice when they resign. I was fortunate enough to get away with 3. Wednesday, September 1st was my last day.

And that was that. Cord cut, next step taken. It felt absolutely awesome. So how does one celebrate such an occasion? I tried to ceremoniously throw away my work bag (it used to hold my lunch and not much else). Not bad, but it wasn’t enough. The occasion called for something else, something more. The occasion called for cake. The Incident cake!

Jess has a bit of a thing for cupcakes. So on Friday night, cupcakes was where we started. Jess came up with the that the cupcakes should resemble the power-up balloons.

Jess made the cupcakes and the icing and I was in charge of the design on top. Here’s what we ended up with:

Pretty cool, but this was just the warm up act.

Act 2: The cake.

Jess took the reigns here. My job was just to look on in amazement. As per tradition, the cake was meant to resemble the application icon.

The cakeability of our icon is quite low; it has complex shapes and lots of detail. But Jess was up to the challenge. Despite being a cupcake aficionado, she hadn’t made an actual cake before. She decided that her first cake should be a rainbow cake.

Here’s how it looked right before going in the oven:

Jess has a detailed explanation of how she achieved that effect over on her blog. Here it is after being ovened, or “baked” if you will:

The cake was now ready for icing. The design called for a lot of purple. Here’s the basecoat:

Needless to say, I was pretty darn excited at this point. It was nearly there. A few small touches and our hero, Frank, and we’d be looking at The Incident rainbow cake. To create Frank, Jess wisely decided to use ready-rolled icing. For those who don’t know, it’s pretty much edible modeling clay.

Yeah. You can actually eat that.

Some cachous for the stars, some yellow icing for the spotlight, careful placement of our hero and boom. The final product:

Now I’m not sure if there’s any way to independently verify this, but I’m fairly sure that this is the best cake ever.

We invited some friends over the following night and ate half of it.

You will note that Frank remains unharmed. There’s a very good chance that he’ll never get eaten. And yeah, the cake was delicious. Thanks Jess!