First of all, allow me to apologize for the extreme lateness of this post. This cake was complete on the 15th of December, and it is now the 31st. If it’s any consolation, I seem to have punished myself by spending new year’s eve catching up on blog posts, which is a scenario that would have sent Kristin circa 2009 into a debilitating shame spiral. But when people resort to snippy wall posts demanding new cake, I guess I have no choice. Also, fondue is happening at Jackson’s house in an hour. Cheesefondue. So, just being realistic here, chances are you won’t be reading this thing until 2011.
This week’s cake was commissioned! First ever commissioned cake. Very exciting. Friend Colin works at a doctor’s office, and they recently had a holiday party at a schwanky golf course restaurant. To be honest with you, the construction of this cake happened so long ago that I am having trouble remembering the details. The point is – the logo of New England Pediatrics is a sunflower, therefore the cake was a sunflower. I started with the center of the sunflower, which is made of cake covered in brown fondant, and I plopped it down in the middle of this nine-inch blue cake. Yes, nine inches. So far I have stuck to the 6″ template, but this cake needed to feed more than myself and whichever gluten-tolerant people happen to be around, so I made it bigger. I broke a rule of my cake plan, but as far as rule-breaking goes, I’d say that this is pretty tolerable.
Days earlier I had gone to cake decorating store, otherwise known as the sass factory, as the employees take pride in both knowing more than you about cake gadgets and less than you about the English language. Asking one of these people for help is a last resort. So there I stood, in front of a wall of hundreds of cookie cutters, looking for one that in some way resembled a sunflower petal. I considered just cutting them out individually, but that method is difficult, time consuming, and in a project like this, likely to look sloppy. So alright, I was standing there, looking back and forth between the wall and a google image search for sunflowers. Any shape you can imagine, they had. Cowboy boot, donkey, fire truck, dumbbell, pistol. No sunflower petal. I decided, against my better judgment, to ask an employee if there were other cutter sets around the store. Keep in mind that this store could easily be on Hoarders. The guy gives me a look that lasts about 3 seconds – enough time to convey his feelings which were somewhere along the lines of “First of all, how dare you ask me a question. Do you see this box of couplers? They’re not going to shelve themselves. Second of all, are you aware that you are standing in front of a wall of cutters? The entire wall is made of cutters. It is a solid and complete representation of what we have to offer, cutter-wise. Lastly, I don’t know you, but I don’t like you, and I can say with reasonable certainty that whatever bush league cake you’re dreaming up right now will be a dismal failure.” Angry at myself for making the mistake of interacting with one of these miserable people, I chose a large teardrop cutter and bent it right there in front of the wall of cutters so that it became longer and skinnier. In the end it made for a pretty good sunflower petal, and I personally felt better about giving these people my money after my blatant vandalizing of a $2.99 cookie cutter under their condescending noses.
Jack’s main contribution to this late-night cake decoration was making a giant petal and considering himself to be hilarious.
I worked out some kinks, such as fixing the gap between the center and the petals with a strip of yellow, and overall the construction was easy. I put some edible brown glitter in the center for, I don’t know, texture, and called it a day.
I delivered the cake directly to the holiday party, just as people were eating their salads. I was woefully underdressed and stayed for about 10 minutes after awkwardly receiving praise in the best way I know how, which is to look at the floor. My favorite part was when one of the partners asked me if the yellow stuff on the cake was cheese.
Colin snapped a picture of me with the cake, and I reminded him about forty times to make sure he gets some sweet action shots for the blog. He did me good – he delivered in a big way.
Although, and this is just constructive criticism: maybe think about varying composition.
No comments:
Post a Comment