Crayola Cake Part II

Thanks to all who commented on the cake. It’s not as slick as the one in my Avon Birthday Cakes for Kids book, but I think Fuzz will remember it. If not, I have tons of pictures to remind her! As for that Avon book, it has tons of cute “carve-and-build” type cakes, which I like and which do not require as much dexterity and precision as the gazillion-star-tip-filled Wilton character cakes. For an amateur cake decorator, it’s a good place to start. The only problem with cake decorating is all the clean-up involved. The process itself is relaxing and fun, but tinting all that icing involved lots and lots of time and paper towels — too much clean-up. You know those “Dream Dinners” places that keep popping up? The ones where you go to a large kitchen and make your own 10 meals for 10 days? They should do a “Dream Cakes” type place where you go to some kitchen, pick out a fully baked cake, then go crazy with icings and decorating stuff. Kind of like a paint your own pottery place but with cakes.

Val, you asked what kind of colors I used. I used Wilton’s pastes, which come in all sorts of colors. They’re beautiful, but they stain like crazy. I also had a major icing bugaboo. I bought Wilton’s copper colored paste thinking the tint might be golden like the Crayola box. Wrong, it was actually a very deep, dark copper and I now have a few cups of copper icing in the fridge. Time to make a Golden Retriever cake or something! Luckily, I had some canned Pillsbury lemon frosting on hand and that, combined with some yellow and red paste, made a good color for the crayon box. So the icing was lemon flavor.

And here’s another little snafu. Remember when I bought the cardamom at Whole Foods? For a while, I’d stored it in its little bag on a shelf in the pantry. For two weeks, my pantry smelled like cardamom. It didn’t bother me until I noticed that all my baked goods had a faint taste of cardamom. My bags of dry ingredients had absorbed the odor and tasted as such. I put the cardamom in a “cardamom relocaton program” where it would leave the other ingredients alone and got rid of what was left of the cardamom flavored flour and sugar. Unfortunately, I missed the cake flour. So the King Arthur Crayola Cake, which called for cake flour, had a distinct cardamom flavor. So I supposed it was a cardamom-lemon cake.

I still haven’t figured out how to sort my pictures in a Photoshop Album, so here are a few more pictures — out of order– of the cake making process.