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.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
there is a face on your trimmed top cake…looks like Twinkie the Kid gone bad…speaking of cute kid cakes, I might be doing this one for my 6 year old niece next week. I think you considered doing something like this once, didn’t you, anna? or maybe you actually did it.http://www.womansday.com/article.asp?section_id=13&article_id=7308&page_number=1
Val, I love that pool cake and have had my eye on it for, oh, two or three years now. Make it and put me out of my misery
.There’s another one that has diving board sticks of gum.Also, you are right about the face appearing in the uncut cake. First I get halos on my cookies, now mysterious faces appear on my cakes. Time to call the paranormal crew.