Behold, the fruits of something like 20 hours of unnecessary labor. You might recognize this cake as a rendition of Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” Or you may not recognize it, if you are an uncultured peasant. In which case, kindly leave my blog, and take your chickens with you.
Seriously though, the goal here was to make a textured mosaic-of-sorts, and I needed an image that had some texture already in it, and also one that was recognizable. Personally, I don’t know what the deal was with Van Gogh’s ear. So if you came here to hear my thoughts on the whole ear thing – leave with your chickens, etc.
When I say “20 hours of unnecessary labor,” I mean that I put a whole lot of time and effort into this thing, and the result doesn’t really reflect that. It’s not terrible, but it just does not convey the fact that I was pasting little blips long into the night over the course of several nights. I do this all the time. I get an idea for a project, and I rationalize my way into believing that it’ll take like a hot minute to complete as long as I keep my head down and plow through the work. Like when I convinced myself that I could put all 3,000 of my parents’ old family photos into new photo albums in a matter of a few days. Like when I decided to make chicken parm for 11 people in like an hour. Like when I swore I’d eat an entire airplane.
I bite off more than I can chew, and when it comes to execution, I am the model of inefficiency. I don’t explore helpful shortcuts or time-savers. I do everything roundabout. I don’t like change. This personality flaw affects me negatively in literally every aspect of life. I haven’t updated iTunes in like 3 years.
So what’s the solution? Justification. Below, you will find my easy how-to guide for the like-minded individuals who would rather cut off their arm before googling “what’s the keyboard shortcut for copy/paste again?”
Print it out, if you need to.
So let’s get to it already. The whole idea was to use lots of tiny fondant cutouts to create a textured image. None of my cutters were small enough to achieve the result I wanted, so I used a little flower cutter, and cut off the little tear-shaped petals. That was probably the most time consuming part – cutting out all the flowers and removing each petal individually.
Oh my god that took forever. I just sat there for hours, removing petal after petal after petal. James stopped by to show his support:
After everyone had gone to bed and I had exhausted The Office on Netflix, I just sat there alone in silence and plucked the petals. Then came the voices.
Ugh, the voices. So honest. I wish they had told me that I was dissecting about triple the necessary number of flowers. Huge overcompensation, there.
So I had the 6″ template, and I got to pasting. I traced the fondant lightly with a sharp skewer to vaguely outline the design, then I just started strategically placing. That also took a million hours.
The completion of this cake happened to coincide with a visit to my brother Joey/fiance Kateri and their brand-ass-new baby, Caroline. Like, extremely new baby. Don’t underestimate how new this baby was. Joey, Kateri, and Caroline had literally been home from the hospital for a couple hours before friend Kathryn and I showed up.
I was holding Caroline and all of a sudden I hear this noise from within her tiny belly that indicated to me that some sort of substance was about to come shooting out of some sort of orifice. Assuming the worst, I immediately went from holding her against me to holding her at about an arm’s length, and lo, she blorched more formula than I could ever imagine would be able to fit in such a small being. What I took away from this experience – ain’t no matter how much love I have for a newborn niece, I am not about to be thrown up on. I will sacrifice this baby’s comfort, and also your carpet, if need be.
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