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.