This is the story of the Cake of Doom. It's a reply to Lin's kind comment in my last post, 'What do you do poorly?'. Cake decorating Lin, it's cake decorating. And when I popped over to her blog, I found a gorgeous lamb cake, a delightful confection that I could only dream of creating. Here is my public shame. Because I'm not completely perfect.
Last time I stayed with Joe, there was a birthday and so there was to be a birthday cake. I don't often cook plain sponge cakes, but I found a recipe and made two acceptable square layers. They were nice and neat and tidy. I used an entire pot of Betty Crocker vanilla icing to sandwich them together, which may have been a bit too much. Then I decided to cut the edges off, to neaten the sides up. As you can see, this didn't happen and the results were raggedy, to say the least. At this point, I poured a large glass of wine to steady my nerves.
I then tried to rescue matters by slathering it in apricot jam...
...and trying to stick the trimmings back on. Of course, it was pretty difficult to find their points of origin, so it was all rather haphazard. But it held together, with a bit of firm squidging.
There was no way on this planet that I was going to make my own fondant icing, so I had bought a lump of ready-made. At this point, I should have taken the cake off the crumby paper, but at the time, I was beyond reason as I had a gut feeling it was going to end badly. Did I mention that I hate cake decorating?
I managed to get the icing rolled out and onto the cake, without major mishap, apart from the inevitable crumbs sticking to it. I hadn't bargained for corner flaps and had to do some quick Googling to find a solution. Which was basically to cut them off. By now I was frazzled, so I bunged it all in a tupperware tub and came back to it the next day.
It seemed ok in the morning, as most things do. The icing was holding the lumpy trimmings in, though it wasn't the pristine snow-smooth surface I had hoped for. Clean paper underneath helped. But the worst part was yet to come. Joe had requested a 'KISS' cake, with cut-out images of every single band member. His favourite band. To be rendered in black icing, from his own artworks, with each image resized to a 10cm square. That's less than 4 inches.
I'm afraid that's where this sorry saga ends, as I DID try thinly rolling out ready-made black icing. I DID get a sharp knife and endeavour to cut out tracings of the boys. But when I picked my first (and last) effort up, it was warm and soggy and fell apart in my hands. I dumped the mess on the kitchen side, took a deep breath and walked away. So it was a big birthday cake fail on my part, and to be honest, the cake itself was sickly beyond belief with all that fondant icing and buttercream. We have agreed that next year, we'll make alternative arrangements.
