Cakey Bakey Heart*

* all credit to the birthday boy for the title of this post. That's YOU doncra.

I love baking and I love this project, but boy - I am really glad to know that the birthday on Wednesday is the only one listed in my office for June. Of course, technically, this means I am giving my manager the boot, but whatever. Don't take it personally, dude.

One reason I will be glad for a break in June is that my pantry is stuffed full of homebrand candy, and I have no idea what to do with it all. This cake added to my large candy collection with spearmint leaves, large and small jubes, bullets, licorice allsorts and chocolate-coated sultanas. If anybody has children who want to rot their teeth out, please come to my house (when I'm not there, preferably)...

Anyway, on to the cake. I was incredibly sensible this week and bought most of my ingredients the day before I baked. Naturally I forgot some of the key ingredients but at the very least I was able to spend my Sunday morning baking the three cakes (two loaf cakes and one round pudding basin) while watching Meet the Press and Insiders.

The pudding basin idea is cute but my oven apparently doesn't cook too evenly, so it was a bit lopsided. Nothing that a bit of trimming couldn't handle though. And then, thanks to Jess for her very helpful tip, I coloured a whole bag of coconut to be "grass", using a freezer bag and some vigorous shaking action. Awesome.

The hardest part of today's cake? transporting it. How to do it, how to do it... 

Martha's Great Engineering Feat of 2010: Putting Boot Cake into Plastic Crate and Transporting for Several Kilometres... Safely!

Degree of difficulty: 5.5

Alterations to the recipe: It is impossible to find miniature candies like in the picture, so i improvised with quartered jelly beans, spearmint leaves and jubes. Once again, I used the provided icing with one of the packet cakes to adhere the grass to the cake board. Also, my chocolate icing always ends up paler than in the book... no idea why but it tastes fine!

Other comments: this cake should feed a LOT of people. It's three cakes skewered together.

And, Family: I promise you guys will be the beneficiaries of the next one

xxMartha

And, after the carnage:

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... watch

Thanks Betty, for the lovely introduction. Apparently Google is smarter than Vic Roads, who reckon it's only 649km that separates the baking gurus - but we know better. It's not about the distance but about the love, and we are definitely sharing the love.

The first chapter of the Book (writing it like that is writing it like it's the Bible, but it's about cakes. which means it's better) is called Story Book Favourites. Favourites, indeed.

The prototype:
Who doesn't remember with fondness the nursery rhyme of hickory, dickory...um, watch. I guess this is designed for the more time poor mothers, who could only decorate a simple 20cm diameter packet butter cake, rather than Betty's next venture, which requires - shall we say - sculpting.

This cake is an adventure in "looks easy but gets messy". Hundreds and thousands go EVERYWHERE... hopefully it's worth it. We will find out tomorrow when my colleagues actually sample it.

I think it worked out well - even though my estimation of "20cm round cake tin" was approximately 3.7cm short. Sorry about the squishy roman numerals, Betty.

xo Martha