So Many Cakes: Nineteen: ...get it? (February 4th, 2011)

It’s a urinal cake! It is both a cake and a urinal. A urinal cake. And although I have never personally used one of these things, I know enough about them to understand that they must be kept fresh. Mainly because people pee in and around them. To my knowledge, and thanks to both a google image search and a movie called “Joe’s Apartment,” I can say with confidence that urinal freshness is regulated by a little pink hockey puck. Which, I mean I don’t know how effective a pink hockey puck is when it’s just raining pee all the time. But again, I have no idea what I’m talking about. I don’t use the things. Lady bathroom hardware is much less varied than dude bathroom hardware, and in my experience, the latter sex prefers to live in a state of denial re ladies even having any use for such hardware. As a naive toddler I lived in ignorance, claiming once that “mommies don’t poop.” Delusional! Of course mommies poop! I blame this misconception of mine on imposed gender norms. Or, I don’t know. I was a pretty dumb kid.

Enough poop talk, let’s think about cakes!

The idea for this cake came from either the mind of boyfriend Jack or friend James, I don’t remember. It took me a little while to warm up to it, but here we are. The cake itself is from a box – yeah, you can expect that from now on, by the way. I lack the funds to keep buying ingredients necessary to make cakes from scratch. And, I know, cake ingredients are generally pretty cheap, but it adds up, let me tell you. So no, I cannot spare that egg. I have to eat that egg and call it dinner, thank you very much.

I figured I should start with a clean slate and cut into it from there. I didn’t have a solid idea of how this whole thing was going to go, incidentally. This became clear when I carefully cut out a chunk to find that brown ganache will always stain white fondant no matter how careful you are. So overall this thing is sloppier than I am comfortable with.

I thought about maybe cutting the cake into a urinal before putting the fondant on, and in retrospect, I think that that would have been a better idea. This is just not clean enough. I’m blaming this one on Cake Boss. While Cake Boss is a decently entertaining show, I have never been a huge fan of their cakes. They are often too ambitious/busy and not very well executed, in my most humble of opinions. But I saw once how they built a cake building and slapped the fondant on in panels. I will never listen to those people again.

I think it’s important for you to know that while I was building this cake, roommate Brendan had control of the TV remote. Personally, I was really looking forward to a night of Extreme Makeover Home Edition and like, syndicated Seinfeld or something. But Brendan had other plans. Plans that were open to just about anything but Extreme Makeover Home Edition. So, naturally, we watched four hours of To Catch A Predator. While Brendan cut coupons.

So the thing was mostly built. It was a struggle. A long one. I moved on the the urinal accessories, a subject that I know very little about. The metal parts, you know? I just had no idea. So I asked roommate Zach and I think he suggested I do a google image search. Little did he know that I had already been through about 25 pages of google images of urinals because when I make a cake I make it right and do my research, you know? At this point I was looking for a genuine male perspective, and you better believe I wasn’t about to ask Brendan.

At this point it was late, I had been working for a while, and I was reaching the end of my rope in terms of being able to produce anything worth looking at. I made some sort of contraption to put on top of the urinal, and also a drain. And in an instant I realized that I was no longer in my parents’ kitchen, and did not have access to all the little knick knacks that lurk in that house, including wooden dowels; great for providing support for pieces that stick out from the cake. Refusing to postpone the completion of this cake to day 2, I searched the apartment for anything that was 1.) dowel-shaped, 2.) relatively clean, and 3.) dispensable. I ended up with a pen from a former marketing job I had, also known as the most unfulfilling post-graduate position, which is saying something. I took it apart, and used one of the innards as a dowel for the top piece. Cake decorating on a budget! And also a little Macgyver in there.

I also put on my clever hat while making the drain – I don’t have any circle cutters, but I do have teardrop cutters, which are circular at the heavy end. So I made a teardrop and flipped the cutter around to make a circle.

I branched out a bit this week. I needed the drain and flusher thing to be silver, and I knew that I couldn’t achieve that with dye paste. I’ve seen a lot of cakes that are painted rather than dyed. I’ve never tried it because I’ve always preferred the look of dyed fondant to the look of painted fondant. I’ve also avoided it because it would involve going to condscendland to buy the necessary materials and ask what the general procedure is. But I did it. After some coaxing, I learned that I can use a colored powder, and mix it with pure extract (extract of what, exactly? I don’t know. I didn’t ask. I was scared.) to create a liquid paint. Turns out that vodka works as a substitute for “extract,” and it just so happened that we had some in the freezer. I’m thinking about writing a book called “Cake Decorating on a Budget: Using Materials One Inevitably has in their Home if they are Broke and Living in New York City.”

The process was easy, just mix the powder and vodka, then paint on with a paintbrush.