It's never too late (or early) to learn UV mapping and get a good texturing workflow going. I'm no pro, but after a little while it gets much less daunting and tedious than it seems to start with. Start by checking out the Maya help tutorial on UV mapping.

But I think I see the problem there, if you really don't want to UV map it, try selecting only the top faces and apply your blinn texture to those faces only, instead of the whole geometry.