1 post tagged “cake”
I should have known this week would be a disaster from the word go.
I put my cake together Tuesday night and it was a little warm in the house, so I stuck it in the freezer and promptly forgot about it. I got it out Wednesday and let it sit on the dining table. A little while later I came back and it was sweating profusely. I touched the cake and some of the frosting came off on my finger and it felt all slimy. Ew! There was no way I was taking that in to cake class. So, I made another cake. I took time off work after lunch and put the cake together while I made the rest of the frosting for the next class. I got the medium frosting for the sweet peas and bows done, then I started on the stiff frosting for the roses. We needed one cup of shortening. How much did I have? Half a cup. I can not believe I've used an entire 6 pound tub of crisco in a month. Ugh. I called D and she agreed to bring more crisco to the house when she came.
After work we went home and I realized I couldn't frost my cake until D got there because I had given her my big froster tip and my spatula/knife thing to wash in her dishwasher. Crap! D was late getting to my house, too, so there was a lot of last minute running around. I finished mixing the frosting while D garotted my cake layers, put a layer of frosting in the middle and put the second one on top. Then she packed the stiff frosting while I frosted my cake, because she still can't get frosting to stick to the sides of hers. This is where fun thing number two kicked in- I ran out of frosting. My poor cake. It was sparsely covered in spots, covered with crumbs and looked like one hot mess. AND we were running late, so we threw everything into the car and off we went.
When we got there, the teacher looked at my cake and raised an eyebrow. I told her my sad sweaty cake story and she said, "You know, if you'd just left it, it would have been fine. It's just condensation. It would have dried in time for class." GAH!!! So class started and she showed us how to make sweet peas and bows. I filled up my frosting bag and my frosting was way too stiff. Crap. I emptied out the frosting bag, put some water in the tub, stirred it up and tried again. I think I made the frosting a bit too runny, but she said it shouldn't work too badly for making roses. Trustingly I filled up the pastry bag. She had us all get out nickels and showed us how to make the beehive shaped frosting base of the rose, then had us make about 15 of them on the wax paper squares we had to bring. Okay, done and donerer. I looked over at D's frosting globs and started laughing. See, we had to bring frosting colored for the bow and sweet peas and D had covered her cake in Tiffany blue frosting. We decided that what goes great with Tiffany blue? Chocolate brown! Except we didn't put enough coloring into the frosting and it was more the color of peanut butter. So, D's frosting beehives looked like tiny mounds of poop. We laughed about that until we noticed the girl across from us. She had neon day-glo pink frosting and her piles of frosting were rather tall and had kind of a pointy top that was wider than the base. It looked like she had a tiny army of bright pink penises. We started snickering. Her mom looked up, saw us looking and said, "You guys! She's only 13!" She said it while she was laughing, so we figured we weren't in too much trouble.
Then it was time to put petals on the rose, and here's where it really came off the rails. She had us put a rosebud type swirl around the top of all of our frosting mounds. We were supposed to really press into the top of the rose to get it to stick. I did, and my mound went splat. I picked up another mound and it puddled too. Yeah. That frosting she said would be good for roses was way too mushy. So I started over. I dumped all the frosting off my wax paper squares and refilled my bag with the stiff frosting for roses. Since I'd made that frosting a little stiffer than the sweet pea frosting, I softened it with a bit of water and also, once I got the bag filled, worked it with my hands to soften it up. Then I made frosting beehives, marveling at the difference the stiffer frosting made. Of course, this meant I was waaaaay behind when it came time to put the petals on. In fact, I'd just filled the bag when she started putting petals on so I half watched, half made beehives. Eventually I caught up and was ready to put my petals on. My first rose looked like someone had kind of smooshed the petals up. It didn't unfold nicely, it was all straight up in the air. To make matters worse, I have no idea if it was the frosting or my tip or what, but for some reason frosting didn't want to come out of the top of the tip as evenly as it did out of the bottom, so I had a really ragged edge to the top of the petals. I set the rose down and tried the next one. D went to take hers off the rose nail and dropped it in her lap. The teacher said that she hadn't wanted to say anything, but every time she's taught the class, someone always drops a rose. Shortly thereafter, I finished my second rose and promptly dropped it. Into my purse. Did I mention my purse looks like this? That pretty green one? Had a pink rose inside it. Yeah. After our rose dropping fiasco, D and I gave up. D put some random designs on her cake and I watched everyone else put roses on their cake and we waited out the end of class.
People in our class had some really pretty cakes. The other Me in class's cake looked really nice and D and I expressed our jealousy. We mentioned she'd done such nice cakes and we wished ours had turned out that nicely. That's when she told us this was her second time in the class. No wonder! At the end of class, the teacher handed out certificates of completion. Mine, appropriately, got a frosting blob on it. D and I talked about it and decided we were a bit burnt out on cake class and maybe we'd wait a while to take the next one. This is good, because I was getting tired of the late Tuesday night frosting and Wii parties and making the metric ton of frosting every week.
The Husband called towards the end of cake class and wondered if we'd be in the mood for food. I told him that after the class we'd just had, D and I needed Olive Garden. See, there's one cure for tough times and that is melty cheese and alcohol. Usually our go to place for that is our favorite Mexican place, where they make queso that's like liquid crack, but for frustration this extreme, we needed Olive Garden. More specifically, we needed red wine, fonduta and a tasty chocolate dessert. That bad. We talked about it at the restaurant and we both knew that making roses wasn't going to be easy, but it seemed like this class had been extra frustrating. Grrr.
When I got home I decorated my cake. No roses. A shell border, lots of sweet peas and a bow. It looked like this.
