Sorry. No food this week. I decided instead to do a cake that would be a solid exercise in a skill that is really important to master – and I also wanted to subject myself to a million hours of hunching and squinting. Mission accomplished.
The timeline I usually stick to has been to bake the cake and freeze it on Friday or Saturday, decorate on Sunday, and it goes up on the blog the following Sunday. I keep this buffer week so that I can take pictures of people eating the cake, or in the likely instance in which busy-ness/laziness takes over, I can accomodate by decorating during the week. This past Sunday, the 28th of November, either the busies or the lazies or the post-holiday saddies took over, and I was like ehhhhh I’ll do this thing later. Little did I know that Monday afternoon would bring an illness so sinister, socruel – I went from being pretty sure there isn’t a God to being like, 100% sure. I’m sort of exaggerating. But I did spend two days home from work watching Wife Swap and pounding fistfuls of cough drops, ibuprofen, and Cheerios.
Having been confined to my bed for the better part of two days, Wednesday afternoon came around and I said to myself – I said – Kristin? Get up. Your leg muscles have all but atrophied. So I wobbled out of bed and succeeded in slapping some green fondant on a misshapen cake. It was not pretty. There were dents and air bubbles, and in my delirium I think I had a staring match with the thing. Needless to say, I lost. I took that as a sign to lie down for a couple more hours.
I returned, rejuvenated, and got down to business. I knew that I would be covering the cake in text, so I drew a guideline for the first line of text with a toothpick.
I had trouble deciding what I would write on this cake. I needed a big block of text – really I could have just run through the alphabet over and over and gotten the same effect. But my God that would have been boring. So I used the “Personal Life” section of Nikola Tesla’s Wikipedia page. Because dude deserves a little recognition.
So not only is this cake sort of nice to look at, you’ll also learn a little something. For instance – did you know that Tesla had OCD and would only stay in hotel rooms with numbers divisible by three? And did you know that he was celibate? For science? Right,Tesla. Celibate. I’m sure that was difficult to stick to, what with your pigeon obsession and your visceral aversion to fat people and pearl jewelry.
Anyway, the frosting I used to do the piping was store-bought. I thought about making my own, and then I didn’t. You may remember my complaint about store-bought frosting (from the “China is Lame” cake), that every time I lift the piping tip away from the cake, a little peak forms. This time I didn’t mind those peaks so much. When there are a million of them, they look sort of cool.
So I’m getting in the zone, finding my rhythm, really making some progress, and the piping bag goes “pff” which means that I have busted a seam. When I say “piping bag” you must realize that I in fact mean “ziplock sandwich bag.” I’ve made this mistake before, as you may recall. But wouldn’t you know it, they don’t sell real piping bags at my local grocery store, so I didn’t really have a choice. That’s another lie! I did have a choice. Cake mentor/cousin Kelly (who’s baby is due today, in case you were wondering) has always encouraged me to use a handmade piping bag. There’s a way to make these things out of parchment paper, and supposedly they are great if you’re doing very intricate piping. I did not look into the construction. While I am sure that the internet would have provided ample direction, I took the sick/lazy route. And this is my punishment.
As I was finishing up the cake, friends filtered in. Brendan oversaw the production with a stoic grace, as usual.
Overall, I found this cake exercise to be exhausting and ultimately rewarding. At the very least, people were fascinated by the peaks.
