This week’s cake is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen. I am not the bragging type. But seriously. You have never seen a cake as visually stunning as the one that you see at left. Notice how I said “You have” instead of “Have you.” This is not up for discussion. It’s beautiful.
This one took me, as far as I’m concerned, a thousand hours to complete. Maybe that’s why I love it so much. It’s like a baby, that’s how long it took to make. This is my gay cake-child, and I am just over the moon for having brought it into this world.
I think that my real victory here is the fact that I didn’t have an extensive cake design plan this week, and I have seemingly pulled it off. I really dodged a bullet. I knew that I wanted to do some sort of abstract design as opposed to my usual course of action: see something tangible in life and try to make a cake that looks like it. I thought about flowers made out of fondant, and I even tried making some paper models which I could later replicate in fondant. I came up with a few, and quickly realized that the only thing that paper and fondant have in common is that they are both sometimes flat and rectangular. I’m giving myself an A for Effort.
I knew that I wanted to work with a color spectrum, so I dyed some fondant and found some older fondant that happened to be desirable colors. And did you know that dying fondant purple is extremely difficult? I had two different types of dye, both purple. I tried them separately, and the result was a chalky blue. Nowhere near purple. So I ditched that hue like third period french and focused on Roy G. B.
After covering the cake I was intimidated, because it was quite literally a blank canvas, and it was just begging to be destroyed.
I ended up using a teardrop shape to cut the fondant. For each piece I pinched the heavy part of the drop to create a petal shape. The most difficult part of this was definitely having the patience to hold each piece on the cake long enough for the water to finish bonding the petal to the side of the cake. Hours passed and still I was there, kneeling on the tile floor, adhering fondant to fondant with sticky fingers. People came and went, syndicated episodes of Saturday Night Live came and went, and still I knelt there. After all the petals were on, I put a candy dot in the middle of each one. You know those dots? The ones that come stuck to paper and don’t really taste like anything but maybe a tiny bit of sugar plus a little bit of paper? Those. I used a skewer to place each one. My knees were all but destroyed before I had the sense to get a pillow for them. In retrospect, a chair would have been more effective.
After finishing this thing at 1:30am on a goddamn Thursday, I reasoned that I would have to serve it to family members up in New Hampshire, as that’s where I would be spending part of my MLK weekend. My greater reasoning also determined that if I wanted this thing to be eaten in New Hampshire, it would have to survive 5 hours in a car. The end conclusion of all this reasoning turned out to be the resolution that I would have to go to condescendland on Friday (cake supply shop near my office) and pick out a nice cake tote. And that I did. I was in and out – I knew exactly where the cake totes were, didn’t have to talk to anyone. I didn’t even look at the cashier’s face.
Anyway, I highly recommend that you invest in one of these, if you’re into that sort of thing. The cake survived the car ride, and then some. Speaking of the car ride, let me take this opportunity to blatantly mooch Adam Ellis’ gig, with some illustrations of my very own:
Jackson and I spent about 12 hours in the car this weekend, and needless to say, there was never a dull moment.
New Hampshire was a good time – I was able to squeeze in a half day of snowboarding which of course became justification for eating my weight in meats and starches that evening. Oh and the cake. I had to talk about how pretty it was for a full 5 minutes before I could bring myself to cut into it. People generally agreed that it was a nice looking cake but also hey how about we maybe eat it.
Eventually things devolved as more wine was introduced. I argued with Aunt Peg for a while about the assumptions that people with very poor eyesight make in regards to those with eyes that are not quite as bad.
Then Brendan, having recently joined his high school’s wrestling team, decided to show his dad how it’s done.
And then this happened.
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