So Many Cakes: 14: Here Comes Terrified Santa (January 2nd, 2011)

Here are some more excuses I came up with to explain why recent posts have been a million years late: 1.) The semester ended, and holiday break began. Your first instinct might be to think that this should in fact move the blog process along, seeing as I’ve got all this time on my hands, but in actuality, the taste of freedom has brought me back to those brief days when I did not have either a full time job and/or at least part time school. These past couple of weeks have been the gateway to extreme and debilitating laziness. 2.) I was distracted by a getaway to New Hampshire’s White Mountains where I had a bad attitude about cross country skiing and Jack had a heroically good attitude about repetitive bruising as I introduced him to snowboarding. 3.) I’m almost hitting the 4-month mark of this project and it’s just long enough to realize that I’ve devoted so much time and still have an overwhelming number of cakes to decorate, which leads to unhappy thoughts like, how much money am I going to end up spending when the year is up, can I continue to crank out passable cakes or will I get sick of it and consistently produce some real duds, or worse, get fed up with the time commitment and stop production altogether, 4.) Desi did something adorable and I had to stop everything to appreciate it using a doggy biscuit and my most awesome of christmas presents: a Nikon D3000.

Now that I’ve let some of my insecurities leak out, let’s get to talking about this Santa cake. I’ve recently had what I believe to be a cake-epiphany, sparked by a book called Planet Cake (birthday gift from dad).

If you ever want to see the absolute gold standard of cake decorating, do a google image search for Planet Cake. Shit will blow your mind. Anyway – this whole time I’ve been using buttercream as the layer between the cake and the fondant, which is all well and good, but with that method it’s very difficult to get the razor sharp cake edge that I so desire. Buttercream is great, but ultimately it is forever malleable and lends itself to bumps and things. Ganache, on the other hand (a mixture of semisweet chocolate and cream) will set on the cake, leaving a hard surface and an adjustable template for the fondant to mold to. This particular cake is very tall, because I used a different pan and about twice as much batter as I should have. It all worked out in the end. I put chocolate frosting between the layers, cut the mouth out of Santa’s head, and got to stackin’. Then I got to Ganachin’, or, as I like to say (for reasons I cannot identify) “Ganooshin’”

I made a fatal error in the construction of this cake, which was to delude myself into thinking that I could cover the top of the cake in one color, and the lower part in another. It was disastrous. Beyond repair. I had to start over by covering the whole thing in red, then layering the face color on top.

Speaking of covering cakes – here’s a makeshift tutorial on wrapping fondant.. Please excuse my whiney, annoying voice. I was getting over an illness, and I also don’t know how to behave in front of a camera. You may recognize this cake as the birthday cake I made for myself a couple weeks back.

So once I got the Santa cake covered, I added some details, and then left it alone for a few days.

During the hiatus, Santa did not have a face. It was just a skin-colored canvas with a crater in it, and my mother admitted that before I put that beard on, she had trouble visualizing the outcome and truly believing that it wasn’t going to be lame. She is indeed the pillar of support throughout this whole operation, my mother.

Before making my way over to Pat’s house for some holiday festivities, I finished up the face. I used the frosting peaks to created a textured beard, and a little skin fondant to make a nose and ears.

I realize that it’s not entirely clear why Santa is suggestively shaped with a sort of suggestive facial expression – really I had the most innocent intentions. He’s supposed to be Ho Ho-ing. But it turns out that it’s just more fun to pretend that he’s drunken Santa. Or knife-wound Santa.

We had a last minute grab bag exchange with a $2 limit, and the results varied from awesome to really, very awesome. Pat got some mouthwash that I think Zach found in his bathroom.