delicious, delicious Hobbiton
Shire cake - hobbit's eye view, originally uploaded by artnoose.
A while back, I kind of allowed myself to be peer-pressured into making a Hobbit-themed cake for the Midwife Center of Pittsburgh's annual gala fundraising cake contest. You know how a funny joke like, "Haha, what if I made another Lord of the Rings cake? Yeah, Hobbits use midwives, don't they?" turns into a real thing? That's what happened.
The theme was "Six Degrees of Separation" which I had to somehow work into the description of my cake. I wrote by far the longest description of any of the cakes submitted to the contest, but my six degrees were:
1. Midwife Center of Pittsburgh
2. Childbirth
3. "ring of fire" (thanks sadie_sabot)
4. Ring of Power
5. Frodo Baggins
6. Shire
Today was the day to make the dream a reality. I baked one round cake and one sheet cake and put the sheet cake on top of the round one, to give it the hill look. I made five different colors of frosting, and played the Fellowship of the Ring while I frosted the cake, meaning that it took around three hours. I had a vague plan but details like the sliced almond masonry came as I went along. It actually helped to watch the scenes from the movie.
The event was pretty fancy, and I was glad that I had thrown on a nice shirt before going. The other cakes were also pretty fancy, and most of them were really tall. Even still, I felt pretty good about having made a great cake, even if it was next to a lot of other great cakes.
There were two categories, the decoration cakes and the tasting cakes. I entered mine in the decoration category because otherwise I would have had to make two identical cakes. After the judges made their official tallies, the space was opened up for everyone to see and taste, including "people's choice" voting. None of the tasting cakes indicated that they were vegan, so I stood in line to file past the decoration cakes and cast my vote there. As we passed my cake, the person in front of me looked at it for a long time and then said, "This is in the amateur category? I thought it was a professional cake. And it's the only one that doesn't use fondant. I'm voting for this one!"
I looked around and realized that yes, every single other decoration cake used fondant, and most of them nothing but fondant. I also found out that a number of them were "display cakes" meaning the core was made out of styrofoam.
I didn't end up winning, which is fine because I didn't expect to. As I was leaving the event, one of the judges stopped me to say that he had given my cake the highest marks and that he was really sorry I didn't win. I got a couple of compliments on the bus ride home, including the driver.
Now I just have to have a bunch of people over for cake.