5 cake

The second party AKA procrastination excuse was a party for Kid 1, who was turning 5. She was so incredibly excited. So, again, we had almost 30 people at our house, aged 4 weeks to 67 years. Kid 1 and I made a 5 cake for the occasion. This is all my Auntie Joyce's fault. When Kid 1 turned 2, I made her a giant cupcake cake, my aunt witnessed this and passed on a cake decorating book from the days of yore. OK, the book's not THAT dated, but it's from another era. No Dora cakes. No Elmo cakes. We're talking Old School. (As an aside, can I just say how intimidating it is to make food for people who are, if not professional bakers, pretty darn close to being pros. I only like baking for people who have low standards. My brothers, for example, will eat ANYTHING.)

In this book from the days of yore are a set of number cakes. When Kid 1 turned 3, she wanted a 3 cake, then 4 for 4 and, predictably, 5 for age 5. I really liked 4, that was an easy cake to make, just chop up a 13x9 cake the right way. But the 5 was a bit tricky, especially since the book calls for various cake pans that I do not have and don't want to invest in - who needs a 10x3 cake pan, I ask you??? And the book designs make cakes that are quite small. So I got a bit creative. Thanks to making the 3 I have an appropriately-shaped tube-ish pan. It's not a tube like an angel cake pan, nor patterned like a bundt pan. It's a 10 inch diameter pan that yields a 2 inch thick round cake, with rounded edges. I bought it at Williams Sonoma, I think. The tricky part was making a round cake and rectangle cake end up the same height. I ended up having a lot of extra cake (to make cake pops of course, except I think I just gave the cake to my mom for some function of hers).

Here's the yummy chocolate cake with chocolate icing. It's a nice dense chocolate cake and the icing is glorious. The recipes for both come from an old issue of Canadian Living (that I stole from my Mom - she said I could take it, I swear!). The decorations were hastily made, they are marshmallows cut cross-wise with a smartie center. Super easy. What is not super easy is rotating this darn photo. Sorry!

I was happy with the cake and so was the birthday girl.

Party!

Yesterday (sheesh, now it's two days ago) I posted a list of things I've been up to. Today I follow up on party throwing. Note: I am not a party-throwing expert (far from it!) although I am getting better with practice. The thing with me is that I am a "go hard or go home" kind of person - so parties at my place always end up big. This wouldn't be such a bad thing if I didn't only have seating for 4 in the room everyone likes to congregate in.* No seating for 25 people who I invite to my home. I always hope for good weather so I can kick everyone outside. Long term solution: renovations. That is a whole other issue for another... well, I'm procrastinating on renos.

First party was a baby shower for my sister-in-law. This was a joint project between my SIL's SIL and moi (with a lot of prep on the day of the shower from my cousin Teresa. Thanks Teresa!) My house has been such a disaster lately, I needed to do a LOT of tidying and cleaning for this one, especially since normal people were coming, not just my family (mwahaha). We decided to have a Winnie the Pooh theme, since my SIL is such a Pooh fan. This was a fun theme to play up, it gave me the opportunity to play around with a few things. First, cake pops. I had been dying for an excuse to make cake pops. Do you know about cake pops? Bakerella has a lot of ideas. She even has a book. Darn internet, though, meant I couldn't just make a regular cake pop. No, I found Winnie the Pooh head cake pops and Hunny Pot cake pops. Awesome! I was smart enough to do a test run and realized very quickly that the Pooh heads were beyond my patience level. But the Hunny pots were easy enough. The tricky part was writing "Hunny" - the Wilton food markers I had were not up to the task and I ended up using black gel icing and it was drippy. If I were going to focus more on cake pops in my life I'd probably hunt down the markers Bakerella recommends. Anyway, these were super easy, even making a cake from scratch instead of using a boxed mix. I just made the cakes the weekend before and froze them. I think I made the cake pops out of red velvet cake.




The other fun project for the shower was a Winnie the Pooh cake. It all started because Kid 1 is allergic to peanuts, which means bakery products are always a bit iffy, so I volunteered to make the cake. I had intended to make just, you know, a cake. But that darn internet! I found a cool Winnie the Pooh cake. This was such a neat idea, I loved the look of the cake. But it was too blue for a girl cake (I love blue but not for a girl baby shower) and it used fondant. There is something you need to know about me: I don't like fondant. First of all, fondant tastes gross. Second, fondant means you have to put two layers of icing on the cake - one buttercream and one fondant. Too much work! Third, I hate rolling out anything, there was no damn way I was going to roll out icing! (I could add a fourth: cost.) A bit of internet searching led me to the paper towel technique. Absolutely fascinating, the things people come up with. Turns out if you ice a cake with buttercream and stick it in the fridge (or just let it sit on the counter long enough), you can rub the cake with an unpatterned paper towel and smooth the icing out to look a heck of a lot like fondant. Smooth fondant look, no rolling pin. I was sold! It was a bit finicky but I could handle it. The inspiration cake had the Pooh characters sculpted out of fondant, but my aunt managed to find some figurines at the Disney Store when she was on vacation. Score!

Anyway, I think it turned out pretty well:

 The "cake board" is an inverted pizza pan covered in scrapbooking paper and then saran wrap. The top layer is strawberry cake and the bottom lemon cake. Both were double layer with raspberry jam between the layers.

OK, that is enough for today. Next up will be the kid's birthday party cake, which wasn't nearly this complicated.

* I do realize that I am ending some sentences with a preposition. I know this is poor grammar. I promise not to do this in my dissertation. But perfectly proper grammar always sounds so haughty to me, I just can't write that way and keep a conversational feel. Suck it up.

Long time no post

Hmmm, been ignoring this blog for a while, huh? I think this proves I'm a procrastinator (I could pull the "I'm working on my thesis" card but really, my thesis is not why I don't blog). However, I'm trying to spark my creative writing muse, which I will need to write my dissertation, so I am challenging myself to a blog post a day until I am done. Writing, I mean.

So... what have I been up to?

1. Distributed/parallel computing,
2. Raising two rugrats and sort-of homeschooling a kindergartener,
3. Baby shower and birthday party throwing,
4. Reading (I have recently banned myself from reading any fiction until I'm done my thesis)
5. Sorting through digital photos. I am taking WAY fewer photos than before, but I need to actually DO something with the ones I have taken,
6. Researching borderline diabetes,
7. Organizing, decluttering, giving stuff away and throwing things out,
8. Facebook. Yup, I got sucked in. It's a mommy networking tool.

In the next few days I'll elaborate on some of these points.