Ten is for Turkey (December 1st, 2010)

Thanksgiving! A day to celebrate that fateful day when the native americans brought corn to the pilgrims and they all had a nice turkey and corn dinner and lived happily ever after. Right? I don’t know.

Thanksgiving has always been a big production at my house. Anywhere between 25 and 30 of my Irish relatives come over, eat things, and digest for a few days. Luckily, I had the foresight to realize that if I wanted to have this cake ready to eat onThanksgiving, I would have to make it before Thanksgiving. So the weekend before I holed myself up in Katie’s house (I was house/dogsitting) and cranked out this cake. To date it was the first time I’ve decorated a cake alone, without at least the moral support of Donnelly to take pictures and help me watch Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. It was a little sad, but Katie has those awesome drawers in her kitchen that won’t slam no matter how hard you close them, so it turned out alright.

There are three types of cake in this thing. The main part is carrot cake. I used brownies to shape the turkey. Then I frosted it. Then I covered it in fondant I had dyed orange and brown. This whole process went pretty smoothly, if I do say so myself.

I think it’s important for you to know which image I worked from. It was a scale model, anatomically correct drawing of a cooked turkey. With a happy piece of toast behind it.

This is nuts! Toast doesn’t have hands! (Is it “toast doesn’t have hands? Or “toast don’t have hands? They both sound wrong).

After I finished shaping the body, I moved on to what turned out to be the cake ass-ache – the drumsticks.

Look at that hideous thing. It’s made of some crummy pumpkin loaf I bought at Food Emporium. It kept falling apart and the fondant wouldn’t stick to it. Had to redo this one. I had planned on making the wings out of pumpkin loaf as well, but after said pumpkin loaf had revealed itself to be lame, I just made the whole thing out of fondant.

For the “stuffing” I wandered around the grocery store for a while, looking at boxes of things and vaguely wondering if they could pass as stuffing. When I got to the cereal aisle I knew that I was on the right track. I settled on reeses puffs cereal. And I’ll have you know that I used about a handful of the puffs for the cake, and yet the box was gone in a day. I have no idea how that happened.

Thanksgiving dinner was standard. There was turkey, there were mashed potatoes…there were 19 bottles of wine consumed by 27 people, 4 of which were considerably younger than 21.

Taking into account the fact that everyone above 21 was somewhere between buzzed and liquored up, the cake was well received. I carved it, almost dropped a drumstick, Brendan and Rory fist pumped in the background. Then we played kings cup and I had to drink a mixture of wine, beer, and coke. You know what? It wasn’t terrible.

Cake Neuf! Boeuf! (November 23rd, 2010)

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, my god, is she capable of making a cake that isn’t in some way related to food? I made an egg cake, an apple cake, a spaghetti cake, and now a burger cake. To this criticism I say that yes, you have a point. But, truthfully, I spend about 89% of my waking hours thinking about when my next meal will be, and what it will consist of. You may as well suggest to Kanye that he should consider thinking less of himself, or that cats should be less stand-offish, or that your phone should ring less when someone calls it. That being said, I should definitely branch out. Except not next week. Next week’s cake is also food.

This week’s cake idea is courtesy of Zach. We were both on the 10:22pm from Grand Central for different reasons: I was in the city late for my Thursday night class, and Zach was getting beers and things with coworkers. One of us was drunk, and the other was not. To be honest I didn’t even realize that he was inebriated until about 10 minutes into the conversation when he announced I HAVE HAD SOME DRINKS.

At some point I confessed that I did not yet have an idea for that week’s cake. Having brought McDonalds onto the train earlier, he had burgers on the mind, I guess. He also bought a couple of what he thought were chocolate chips cookies. When he found out that they were oatmeal raisin his reaction was something like WHAT IS THIS GRANDMA SHIT. This is not related, but I found it to be hilarious.

I learned from last week. I was rational and calm. I cut the cake into the shape of two buns and there was purpose in every stroke of the blade. It came out alright.

So really the only parts of this cake that are made of actual cake are the buns. The rest is fondant (I used a lot of fondant this week), and the patty is rice krispie treat covered in fondant. I figured that rice krispie treats would be a pretty good substance for a beef patty because it does pretty much whatever you want it to do, and it also has the capacity for many textures between smooth and bumpy. I bought a box of little ones, and microwaved them. This turned out to be a horrible mistake, and then it turned into one of those happy mistakes. It was a roller coaster of emotions. First I was happy, because it turned out that microwaving rice krispie treats makes them very malleable. Then I was sad, because as soon as I tried to separate my hands from the mass of goo and rice puffs, everything came apart.

Then I was relieved, because once everything started cooling down, the puffs were more willing to stick to each other. Then I was hungry. Then I was very happy to learn that the melting/reshaping technique had created an extremely bumpy patty, and once I covered it in fondant, it seriously looked like a hunk of tasty, tasty meat.

So the buns and patty were done first, and I stacked em up to see what the world’s most boring burger would look like. In case you were wondering, it looks like a manwich.

The buns and patty were, to me, the Everest of this cake. As long as I could pull off a somewhat passable set of meat and breads, I could relax. Satisfied with the result, I had a stretch and a bend, and Donnelly thought that it would be a good photo op.

Next was the fun part, making and adding all the fixins. I still had leftover red fondant from the China cake, and it became tomatoes. Still had some green from, I don’t know, the worm cake? So that became lettuce. I had to actually dye the cheese yellow, which did not sit well with my lazy ass. The onions were easy because onions are white, and so is fondant.

Sunday was my mother’s birthday, and while I didn’t forget about it, I clearly didn’t have the foresight to make a cake that was relevant to her. Like maybe a normal cake that said something nice like “Happy Birthday, Mom.” Or a “Dancing with the Stars” cake. So she got a cheeseburger cake. Had a little fun with it before the demolition.

The perspective is way off, but just look at those faces.

Cutting through the cake was a challenge. The fondant and the rice krispie really put up a fight. But look at how awesome that cross-section is.

If you have had the patience to read through all the posts on this blog, first of all, I applaud you. Second-of-ly, you may remember the anniversary cake I made for my parents. It was a disaster. It looked bad, it tasted bad, and my mother was not shy about vocalizing this. Since then, I have not made a cake explicitly for my parents. To let the wounds heal. You may also remember, from a few paragraphs ago, that I did not plan for my parents (namely my mother) to be eating this cake. So I made some crummy box pound cake because it was easy and sturdy. Now I had to once again face my mother’s brutal honesty in the cold light of day. Well, night. We ate at night.

Luckily I had picked up some vanilla ice cream to accompany the dense pound cake, and she totally bought it.

Look at that face. It reads, “Yeah, ALRIGHT. Fine. It’s good.”

I counted it as a win, then we took some pictures.

Cake Eight: Ate Cake. (November 16th, 2010)

Alright so you wouldn’t know it from this picture, but this cake was a real doucher, let me tell you. I had started the weekend with such ambition but by Sunday afternoon I found that I had accomplished very little. Sunday started like a lot of Sundays do, with a delicious brunch.

After asking the sweet, sweet lord to bless our waffles (my prayer came from an episode of Fresh Prince of Bel Air), we ate by candlelight until I noticed that it was like 3:30 and i had shit todo. Generally discouraged from that weekend’s lack of productivity despite my honest attempts at being productive, I started hacking away at the cake as if it had wronged me in some personal and irreparable way.

I think that Zach’s facial expression here pretty much sums up the general vibe in the room at this point. If that face could talk it would ask me if I was aware that cake, unlike hair, does not grow back after you trim it. 

The result was this misshapen, hideous thing. That roundish blob is supposed to be a bowl. A spaghetti bowl. To be fair, I think that the unattractive shape had a lot to do with the cake itself. This week, I went all out and spent 89 cents on a box of store brand yellow cake. Needless to say, my laziness did not go unnoticed. Also, I didn’t work from a proper sketch as I said I would from now on. This is what I worked from. 

I decided to stack munchkins in the “bowl” – otherwise I would have had three solid inches of frosting atop the cake. I don’t care who you are. That’s gross.

At this point I should have taken a break. I was so ENRAGED that my cake so far looked like a tumor. I really should have taken a step back to let my irrational anger dissipate. But I didn’t. I forged on. Then this hot-garbage situation showed up.

Donnelly cowered in the corner as I unleashed a stream of obscenities unto the frosting, as if it had planned this shit. In reality it was not the frosting’s fault. It was mine, for misplacing my regular piping bag and using a flimsy ziplock sandwich bag in its place. You can’t use a sandwich bag in this manner and not expect some sort of explosion.

Emotions were running high and I REALLY should have taken a break here. I didn’t. 

Instead I took a serrated knife to the cake and, without any sort of deliberation or strategy, cut the thing in half. Radially. That was the end of the bowl. 

Resigned to the fact that my cake would now be a pile of spaghetti rather than a bowl of spaghetti, I considered the chocolate munchkin. 

Did it really look like a meatball? We decided yes – partially because I was in no mood to find an alternative, and also it did actually play the role of meatball pretty well. 

So I framed the cake in meatballs, summoned all the frosting in my house, got into the power stance and covered everything. Then I go to use the saran wrap for whatever reason and find the sliding blade to be missing. Again at this point I will admit that I should have stepped back and calmed down. But I didn’t! I did what seemed most rational at the time, which was to grab the largest knife in the drawer to attack saran wrap, which we all know is one of the most stubborn and immovable of substances.

After covering the cake with spaghetti to the best of my ability, I rolled out some leftover red fondant from the China cake and cut out a shape that I thought best represented pasta sauce. I then attached the meatballs on top with skewers.

Cut to almost a week later, when we finally get around to eating the cake. All in all it was barely a cake. I think this is best demonstrated through a pie chart. 

As you can see, this cake is mostly munchkin, and in case you didn’t know, those things don’t keep well. They were sort of stale and crumbly, but everyone was very nice about it and even made “mmmm” noises. Also, Katie refused to not be blurry in photos.