For future reference - and you may have noticed this - I tend to design cakes that are in direct reference to some sort of either significant or insignificant event that has happened during the week before cake execution. So far it's been birthday and brunch, and I guarantee that there will be more junk like that. This week's cake came to me in a dream, more or less, and last Tuesday at around 11:30am as I sat in my cube it fell out of my head and onto some office stationary. Take a look at the accuracy of that sketch. Technical skill like you have never known.
Had some ee-shoes in the early stages of this one. I had a concept, and I needed to purchase a couple things from the cake decorating warehouse near my office. This srote has every possible gadget/tool/decoration/bakeware item one in the dessert industry could ever hope for. It's overpriced, understaffed, and employees generally sit behind the counter, socialize, and roll their eyes when you ask to see the binder listing the piping tip industry codes. Located on 22nd street between 5th and 6th avenue, this place is a short four-block walk from my office, and I have been known to go in there with a $5 budget and a 10-minute time window only to emerge 40 minutes later with $30 worth of something dumb like designer cupcake wrappers. Thursday afternoon, though, I went in there with a purpose. A list. A list of three things. Green food coloring, white chocolate chips for melting, and a hemisphere cake pan. And hear this, reader: I stuck to it.
All was well until I attempted to wrap the cake. This happened.
This is pretty much the worst thing ever. There isn't too much I can do, here. I can either start over and re-roll, or I can assess the situation and decide that ehhh I'd rather not because, well, it's not that bad, and re-rolling sounds like a whole thing. So I patched it up as best I could and forged on.
I bought white chocolate chips because I was hoping to melt them down in a double boiler, dye them blue, pour the misture into a bag with a hole cut in the corner, draw monster hands onto wax paper, freeze it, and use these shapes as three-dimensional additions to the cake. You can refer to my detailed sketch if you are at all confused. So this is what ended up happening:
It didn't melt - it clumped. And I am still unsure as to why that happened. But it became clear pretty quickly that my original plan was not going to work. So I settled on the big fat fondant arms, and I'm happy with the result.
This one was particularly difficult to cut into. It was as if it was begging me - please, my head hurts already, I would really rather you didn't perform a biopsy.
But I did it anyway, because I was getting the stink eye from the people who came over and were promised cake.
Zach ate it, and was thrilled.
Donnelly ate it, and found something to be hilarious.
Colin ate it, and was distracted to something stage right.
Jack yelled at it, and then ate it.
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