Epic Cake is Epic
I made an Ugly Cake!
(on purpose)
So yeah, it's ugly, it's a cake, and I made everything on it from scratch. I wanted to practice my baking skills so that they wouldn't get terrible the next time I wanted to use them. I failed at making a good-looking cake, so I embraced the ugliness and went with it.
The cake itself is a slightly modified version of a Puerto Rican cake called a Ponque (pon-ke), I say slightly modified, but really it's almost an entirely different recipe minus the preparation order. The cake is designed to be baked and then sit for a few days getting decorated before itś ready to eat, so it has a syrup and is usually topped with fondant to keep it fresh before the wedding/party.
I frosted it with homemade rolled fondant, thats right, I'm that good; I waited for the fondant to dry out to give me that crackled look on the surface before putting it on some uneven butter-cream to give the cake an ugly shape. I painted it with green and black food colorings using cotton balls and some water drops for the subtractions (white spots).
I busted out my confectionary kung fu in order to make all the little bits on the cake. Thats right those are two different techniques using nothing but powdered sugar and dyes to make the volcanic rocks and little red plant things. The red plants are just hardened caramel strings, the rocks are a baked, coagulated powdered sugar/ water reduction. It's simple if you know how to make candies.
And the finished product:
I was gonna make aliens, but I was too tired by the end of it.......tasty, tasty aliens.
Well thats my B-Day cake, hopefully some of you will be lucky enough to try this secret family recipe, seeing as how it's usually made once every 2-3 years.
now, aren't you glad this is behind a LJCut? :P