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Whatever artistic talent I may have with words, I have none when working with chocolate buttercream as my medium. This afternoon was spent making a birthday cake for Philomythulus, and although the train cake design is pretty simple, it started to look like a dog's breakfast once I tried to ice it. In my defence, I will say both that while I have tried to write well pretty much every day for the past decade and a half, I only make complicated birthday cakes a couple of times a year, and secondly I had the 'help' of both children. Cub confined himself to climbing my legs and howling when not allowed to eat the cake, but Philomythulus kept moving things around, sticking his hand into the icing, altering the design and trying to break off bits of cake to eat.
All I can say is, you can hide a multitude of sins with mini smarties, jelly babies and chocolate buttons, because the train cake actually looks passable now. At least, it probably wouldn't be worthy of mention on Cake Wrecks. And fortunately it's only going to be us who eat it, because with the number of sticky fingers in the mixture, it would not pass even the laxest of food hygiene standards. At least it's all tasty.
I used this cake recipe, only baked in a single rectangular pan instead of as cupcakes, then cut it into train-carriage-shaped rectangles, stacked two on top of each other for the engine (the leftover half-rectangle was divided amongst the three cooks as a perquisite). Then it all went wrong with the icing, though once there were white chocolate buttons on as wheels, jelly babies as passengers and mini smarties as cargo and general decoration, it started to look quite good again, at least from a distance. Liquorice laces make the tracks underneath, and a big 8 candle forms the smokestack.
Next year I'm using ganache instead of buttercream. The trouble was that when I tried to spread buttercream on cut surfaces of cake, the cake crumbled, the buttercream didn't stick and I had an unappetising and unattractive mixture of cake crumbs and buttercream stuck to my pallet knife and no actual icing on the cake. I think ganache would go on more smoothly and less lumpily.
I really am quite a good cook. It's just that I'm no good at all at presenting food prettily and tidily.
Crossposted at http://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/109002.html. There are
comments there.
All I can say is, you can hide a multitude of sins with mini smarties, jelly babies and chocolate buttons, because the train cake actually looks passable now. At least, it probably wouldn't be worthy of mention on Cake Wrecks. And fortunately it's only going to be us who eat it, because with the number of sticky fingers in the mixture, it would not pass even the laxest of food hygiene standards. At least it's all tasty.
I used this cake recipe, only baked in a single rectangular pan instead of as cupcakes, then cut it into train-carriage-shaped rectangles, stacked two on top of each other for the engine (the leftover half-rectangle was divided amongst the three cooks as a perquisite). Then it all went wrong with the icing, though once there were white chocolate buttons on as wheels, jelly babies as passengers and mini smarties as cargo and general decoration, it started to look quite good again, at least from a distance. Liquorice laces make the tracks underneath, and a big 8 candle forms the smokestack.
Next year I'm using ganache instead of buttercream. The trouble was that when I tried to spread buttercream on cut surfaces of cake, the cake crumbled, the buttercream didn't stick and I had an unappetising and unattractive mixture of cake crumbs and buttercream stuck to my pallet knife and no actual icing on the cake. I think ganache would go on more smoothly and less lumpily.
I really am quite a good cook. It's just that I'm no good at all at presenting food prettily and tidily.
Crossposted at http://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/109002.html. There are
comments there.