Threescore men and threescore more

So, on a day where my anxiety about moving to a new town started to kick in, compounded by steady drizzle, eight flights of stairs and an unhealthy addiction to hardcore p0rn the second series of True Blood, I managed to create a successful AWW birthday cake.

After the consummate disaster that was The Wonderful World of Disney, I got to try my hand at an old skool nursery rhyme character.

Humpty is the sixth cake in the Book and the seventh in our quest. Some background trivia:
- Apparently the HD rhyme was first officially published in 1810
- It was originally designed to be mean to short fatties
- The original words were:

Humpty Dumpty sate [sic] on a wall,

Humpti Dumpti [sic] had a great fall,

Threescore men and threescore more,

Cannot place Humpty Dumpty as he was before.

The cake looked easy: one single loaf cake, one quantity of chocolate Vienna cream, and a snappily dressed egg-man hybrid with an inkly expressive face.

But, just like a maths is easy once you've seen the answer and the workings, so it was with reverse engineering the cake. Oh sure, to you all it's just a cake made to look like a brick wall. But, O! The humanity coconut. So much food colouring, so many small flecks of coconut flying around, and so much icing to stick it down. Luckily the cake came with its own icing, which tastes like crap but works well as glue.

Just when I think my mad skillz are improving, the AWW throws me another challenge. Decorating HD really, really stretched me. I am not an artist and I haven't decorated eggs since I was about 5, which made this trickier than I expected. At least I avoided having to actually source fabric and make clothes.
Truth be told, there was no glory* in this venture – but it was fun to make even though some adjustments were made out of necessity.

Degree of Difficulty: 6.5 (was going to be 5, but decorating the egg bumped it up...plus, I burnt the fucker).

Changes to the recipe: find a freakin doll to use instead of a real egg! Also, I chose to use multicoloured smarties instead of freckles or hundreds and thousands for the path – I had them on hand and there's no associated mess.

And, Betty, just for you and because I know neither of us have done our French homework:

Un petit d'un petit

S'étonne aux Halles

Un petit d'un petit

Ah! degrés te fallent

Indolent qui ne sort cesse

Indolent qui ne se mène

Qu'importe un petit d'un petit

Tout Gai de Reguennes.

(sound it out – don't attempt translation!)
*“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master that’s all.”
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. “They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”

xxMartha

Storybook Favourites #4: Mickey Mouse

This is how I feel when I contemplate yet another Disney offering:

Once again, I'm faced with recreating a character that I didn't like. It's not so much that I mind even that, but the fact that the characters I don't like are the hardest, most complicated ones, and the ones with the most sprinkles – which look gorgeous once they're on, but stick to your fingers like bitches.

Anyway, my Mickey Mouse was a truly gourmet creation, put together from raspberry swirl cake and orange poppyseed cake (when I say “raspberry swirl” I use “raspberry” in its loosest sense. Put it this way – no raspberries were harmed in the baking of this cake).

The cakes were a lot better this time and the cut-out sections were easier to ice than Donald, perhaps because my Canberra kitchen was warmer and the frosting stayed a bit more pliable. Still though, I don't remember my mum cursing and swearing and generally not coping with this book, but my earlier arrogance optimism after managing hickory dickory watch so easily has come back to haunt me.

Mickey Mouse looks like he has a five o'clock shadow, compounded by the random sprinkles around his face like stubble.

Mmm, stubbleicious.

Over to you, Betty. May you have better luck with Minnie!

ETA: Points that my colleagues have raised, validly, are that I haven't mentioned what went wrong, the difficulty level nor time taken.
So, on a scale of 1-10 (with 10 being impossibly hard) I would rank Mickey an 8. He took about 2 hours to do (not including the cakes themselves), which was a LONG time to stay awake on a wine-y Sunday evening.
How to improve Mickey/comments on the recipe:
1. Don't use Smarties for his eyes - M&Ms are smaller and darker and would have worked better
2. He needed a minimum of 1.5 quantities of buttercream frosting, not the 1 that the recipe mentioned
3. Next time, I think I would pipe on his mouth with chocolate frosting, because the sprinkles were really hard to contain in the lines I'd traced out and they sort of went all over the kicthen floor.
4. I couldn't find red ribbon anywhere - possibly because Sunday evening isn't the best time to shop for these things. Note to self: shop well in advance to take account of difficult-to-trace materials.
xxMartha

Giant Donald Duck Sucks Giant Donkey Balls

Wow, Betty, your narrative puts me to shame!

I can't say much about my next attempt - Disney was never one of my favourites, and Donald Duck - out of all my not-favourite Disney characters - was never on my excitement radar.

However, we don't get to pick and choose these cakes, so I attempted Mr Duck. As you may guess from the title of this entry, it wasn't entirely successful.

One thing that I did not remember about DD was that his middle name is Fauntleroy - and apparently, he is a VIP member of the Mickey Mouse Club.

Erm. So, yeah. That's my limit...

On to a general comment about the Book though, and that is that the amount of food colouring used to get the vibrant colours in the pictures is obscene. Seriously, I didn't get DD's beak anywhere near as orange as the pics and I used an entire bottle of orange colouring. Scary!

My second comment about the Book is that if nothing else, it is providing me the opportunity to make cake-mix-cakes. These were (and are, actually) a complete no-no in my house when I was growing up, and I think i really missed out.

Yes, they taste like chemicals - but so fluffy and so easy!

Anyway, DD was a special cake for the Big Boss's birthday - I hope it was enjoyed.

The next challenge is Mickey Mouse.

You heard me - M-I-C-K-E-Y-M-O-U-S-E... Mickey Mouse!




xxMartha

Hickory Dickory Clock

Cake # 3 was the first official birthday cake, to celebrate l'anniversaire de Jane-o. Following French class, I was pressed for time, so a packet mix was selected as the way forward. Given the the call for brown icing, chocolate seemed the natural choice for this one and so the Coles choc packet mix had its first run.

Improvising a little due to my lack of a large, deep rectangular cake tin, I made a loaf plus a square, which I cut in half diagonally to create the triangle. I also decided to try lining the tin rather than greasing it for once, to see if that stopped the edges from drying out as much. Lesson learned: if the paper is not flat to the tin before you put it in the oven, it won't work itself out while baking - my beautifully risen cakes unfortunately had a few kinks in the sides where the paper was sticking out ... whoops! Luckily, it was only a small issue and nothing that volumes of chocolate icing couldn't cover.

To decorate, I utilised the handy choccie icing that came with the packet mixes. They turned out a bit darker than the pic, but still looked (and TASTED) great. I also tweaked the pink icing, adding some strawberry jam to add to its authenticity (thanks Martha, for the hot tip on this one).

Two packs of choc beanies (there weren't any big packs of smarties in the supermarket) were needed to reach the pink smartie count, while both traditional and pink liquorice were finely sliced to make whiskers and tails for the prune mice. What could have become a drama in forgetting to pick up freckles was resolved through some quick thinking improvisation with marshmellows and sprinkles (from the number four cake decorations).

A lucky pickup - a pack of cake decorating letters, already piped and dried - in the supermarket saved the time it would have taken to pipe numbers on the clock, and really stood out against the dark icing. With these, I was also able to personalise the cake for the birthday girl. Finalising the decorations in the wee hours this morning, it looked like it had shaped up to be a good one.

The real test however was by the highly tuned taste-buds of my colleages. Again, the Coles packet mix proved a winner - light and fluffy with great-tasting icing! There was plenty of cake to go round (even with an additional birthday girl) bolstered by the mini strawberry cupcakes that I also baked for our visiting former Business Management Director.

A big happy birthday to both Jane-o and Liz!

Betty x




Just found - my 2nd Birthday cake - looks familiar!

Every princess deserves a castle

My first cake was baked in a whirl-wind of a weekend, spent looking after my little cousin, Mish-Mash. Remembering my own fascination with this great book a a child, I thought I would give her the book to pick which cake she would like to bake - just cos. (Man, if only I got that option as a kid...I was stuck dreaming!)

Remembering my own favourites, I should have predicted that the winner would be the one with the most lollies to decorate and of course the chosen cake was the castle. (A surprising close second was the stove - I think for the jaffas - Mish's favourite!)

Heading up the 'For Girls' section, the castle represents every little girl's dream of being a princess in a fantasy land where the walls are edible and decorated with colourful candy.

A trip to Coles was in order to stock up on all the right lollies, as well as baking ingredients and toothpicks (for the flags). A few improvisations were made for the sweets we couldn't find - Tim Tams seemed a much tastier alternative for the wafer doors, and somehow Jaffas worked their way into the trolley, in addition to the rest.

For this cake, I decided to try out the butter cake recipe provided in the book. Part of my reasoning behind this was that I wanted Mish to experience baking beyond the packet mix.

Mish had a great time measuring out double quantities in the retro bowls and cups, while I discovered that my $9.99 hand electric beaters from Coles are not really big or strong enough for a double mix - the result was mix spinning its way up and almost into the mechanics...

Utilising the tins I already had available, we baked a square cake, plus muffin sized cupcakes to create the bases for the turrets. This turned out to be a great concept - except that the square cake didn't really rise very high, meaning that our Tim Tam doors turned into half Tim Tam doors!

With the cake assembled, it was time for my first attempt at fluffy frosting. Surprised to discover that no icing sugar was actually involved, I started the daunting task of making toffee to add to whipped egg whites to form a sickeningly surgary foam. Surprisingly ... success! A team effort with my little helper whipping the egg whites into shape while I concentrated on not burning the toffee on the stove produced a pretty good first attempt - spoon licking good!

And thus it was time to let the decorating begin! Mish went to town placing the Tim Tams, smarties and jubes, while I struggled to cut up liquorice allsorts to make the flags. An hour or so later the lolly packets were empty and our stomachs were too full of raw cake mix, icing and smarties, but most importantly, the cake was done!

Ta-da!!

All that was left now was to deliver the cake to its prospective consumers - namely Auntie K and Uncle D - who were suitable amazed!

To the adults, it seemed almost a shame to cut it up for no particular purpose, but Mish had no qualms about sticking the knife in and dishing out some generous servings!

The verdict - perhaps a little dry, but overall a creative and tasty masterpiece.

Betty x