Lately I’ve been feeling like my checking account statement is too large for its own good. So I decided to move to Manhattan.
A week ago I was commuting to the city from my hometown in Connecticut. Now I am sitting in a four bedroom apartment on Wall Street with roommates Jack Zach and Brendan (soon Joe), watching Larry King inadvertently impersonate a frog on Conan. I am also eating goldfish crackers. Basically living the dream.
However, living the life of extravagance comes at a price. Until I figure out a way to supplement my ridiculous excuse for income, I will, from this point on, be unable to justify chai lattes, meat that isn’t chicken tenders, sun dried tomatoes, hale and hearty soup, dessert, parmesan cheese, fresh things, etc. The list is literally endless. If at this point you don’t know how important food is to me, then you should maybe consider enrolling in a local community college english course, because you are seriously inept at extracting information from text. And images, for that matter.
I decorated this jujube-shaped cake the night before I moved to the city. Colin came over for one last New Canaan hoorah, which involved sitting around, talking, and demolishing my mother’s christmas boxtree centerpiece. After a while I realized that it was getting late, and cakes don’t usually decorate themselves. So in the spirit of this cake’s theme, I rounded up some old fondant that I had dyed months ago. To conserve. I tried out a technique that I had accidentally stumbled upon back in September. It was my second cake. I rolled out some fondant, then used a ball of different-colored fondant and rolled it out right on top of that first one. It worked beautifully. I even commented on how I’d have to try that technique again.
Well get an eyeful of this disgusting failure.
So I started over by just mixing all three colors together. Luckily they were all relatively similar colors, otherwise we would have been dealing with a poop-colored cake. And again, in the spirit of this cake’s theme, I would have allowed that to happen because I am in no position to be throwing out perfectly good fondant.
As you can see from the end result, I gave myself a bit of a break this week, design-wise. Because of all the moving nonsense. But I recently invested in these sweet letter fondant cutters and thought I’d give them a go. What do you think? Legible? I agree.
I thought about going to condescendland for some florist wire, which comes either coiled or in separate straight pieces. But in the spirit of this cake’s theme, I didn’t. Because even little bits of wire are overpriced there. So I turned to my father, who is more often than not equipped with any piece of hardware you could ever imagine. He dug to the depths of our nasty garage, and emerged with an enormous coil of wire. Anyone in their right mind would have been disgusted at the idea of introducing this soiled coil to anything resembling food, but IN THE SPIRIT OF THIS CAKE’S THEME I said fuggit, carry on.
But don’t worry. I sanitized them with this stuff.
The next day, bright and early, Jack, Zach, Brendan and I embarked on moving day by loading all of our earthly possessions into a 26′ uhaul truck, and driving it to our new apartment. The largest truck offered, Zach drove that thing like a boss from Connecticut to the narrow streets of lower Manhattan. After what seemed like 3 weeks, all of the beds and desks and tables and chairs and boxes and shoes of Zach were strewn about the apartment, and we were toasting champagne before classing it up with vodka and sprite.
The moving in was exhausting. The thought that I will be living off of goldfish crackers and rice for at least the next little while is terrifying. At least there will be cake. SPEAKING OF WHICH – you may have noticed that I’ve added a little donate button to the right. Certainly, you should not feel obligated. Ask me if I donated any money to Wikipedia while Jimmy Wales looked me in the eye. I did not.
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