Surprise Cakes

This year has been the birthday season of the surprise cakes. 

The first birthday is Quinn's, and he couldn't decide what kind of cake to ask for.  Mona wanted try her hand at making a cake this time, and offered to surprise him.  He liked that idea, and the result was this adorable cat cake.

Pretty much all of this was Mona.  I baked the actual cakes, but Mona did all the sculpting and decorating.  I would like to mention that my end of it was no small deal in that I wound up baking three sets of cakes three days in a row.  Her original idea was a "transfer mouse" from some online game the two of them like to play together, and she wanted it standing.  I tried to explain (based on my vast amount of experience with past cake wrecks) why the way she was going at it wasn't going to work, but some lessons one must apparently learn for oneself.  There was one collapsed cake, then another even more collapsed cake, before Mona finally accepted my adage of "The cake should be wider than it is tall to remain stable" and the cat cake came to be.

We had a nice quiet birthday with Quinn this year.  He made a million cereal treats to take to school both for his classroom and for the after school geography club, and for dinner we tried a new taco truck and ate while watching anime at home.  (I highly recommend the short series "Erased" if you haven't seen it.)

He did love his cake and asked if he, in turn, could surprise Mona with a cake for her birthday.  Mona was scheduled to spend her birthday weekend at a sleepover for a friend whose birthday is on the same day, so Quinn and I decided we needed to make a cake that was easy to transport so she could take it to the party.  It wasn't at all what Mona was expecting because the cake was simply cake-shaped, but I think it came out cool and Quinn did a good job.

We made a "checkerboard cake" which means we used different colored batter in concentric rings in the cake pans so that when the layers were stacked they would look like a checkerboard when you cut into it.  That way the surprise cake had a surprise inside as well.

This one took a couple of tries, because the first attempt was with chocolate cake and white cake, and we learned the hard way that the two textures of cake don't hold together, so we just added different colors to white cake.

Quinn also wanted to go crazy with frosting colors and the piping bags, so we did.

Right before Mona's birthday, though, was another cake decorating/fundraiser event at Aden's school.  Last year Aden made a spectacular dragon and geode cake, and it won first place, but it was too beautiful to cut into and wound up not being the best choice for a fundraiser where people pay to buy slices after the awards.  This year she went with something more accessible: a candy sushi plate.

The fish part is just a basic chocolate cake cut to the right shape and frosted, and I helped again with baking and a bit of the crumb coat which got tricky, but the rest of it was just Aden working late into the night with cereal and marshmallows and candy.  There are Oreo crumbs in there, gummy fish, fruit roll ups, Twizzlers... 

 

I think she did a beautiful job.  (And so did the judges, who awarded her first place for the second year in a row.)
 

My mom was in town briefly in the middle of birthday season and decided to make a collective cake for us to celebrate with all together.  The cake itself was a chocolate chip cake with custard filling that was delicious, but to top it off we put on a "magic candle" we found at the grocery store. 

You light the center wick, the flame gets kind of high (the instructions suggested we should be 3-4 feet away from it), it sparks briefly, then opens like a flower with tiny lit candles that burn down quickly as they make the whole thing spin slowly.  It was also supposed to make music, but we didn't get that to work until after the candles went out.  The package described it as making "continuous music" which is apt, since the only way we could shut it off was to crack the candle housing open and disconnect the battery from the speaker.  We loved that weird thing.

For Aden's birthday she wanted to continue the surprise cake theme and have her siblings make whatever they chose.  They settled on a shield and sword from the Legend of Zelda, which worked out well because Aden had a skating party at Incrediroll again, followed by a sleepover, so we had a cake for each site.

This time we used fondant to decorate with.  I baked a couple of cakes again, but the kids made the fondant themselves and did all the real work.  I helped with some frosting work again, and I cut out the white and yellow fondant bits for the shield, but the rest of it was all Quinn and Mona.

Aden managed to walk into the kitchen at the wrong moment and saw the drawing we were working from which spoiled some of the surprise, but she wasn't expecting two cakes, so part of it was still unexpected.  Cake is cake, though.  Surprise or no, it still tastes good.

Best cake making tip I can share this year is the glory of parchment paper.  We cut out parchment paper to fit along the bottom of all the pans and it made lifting the cakes out to do things with incredibly easy.

In between Quinn's birthday and Mona's birthday is Thanksgiving, and I feel the need to show that not everything we make comes out pretty.  My grandma used to serve orange jello at the big holiday meals, and I inherited her cut-glass jello plate and the mold in the shape of a ring that fits on it perfectly.  I also inherited the recipe, but have yet to make it work. 

The orange jello calls for (appropriately) three boxes of orange jello, orange sherbet, mandarin orange slices, and crushed pineapple.  The problem is this is one of gram's recipes where the amounts of everything are unclear because it just says "a can" or "a box" and we have no idea what the proportions are.  Every year we make a new guess and every year we end up with orange soup.  Luckily orange soup is still delicious, but I think gram would horrified that we're serving a giant bowl of brightly colored goo in her honor on our holiday table.

We'll try again at Christmas.

In the meantime, no more cake for a while.  We are caked out.

Double Digits (Babble)

I have a kid who is ten.  I’m having trouble settling my mind around that idea.  Ten years is such a substantial number.  If you say you’re going to put something off for ten years it sounds like it may as well be a million.  But now I can look back ten years and I’m still a mom then.  How crazy to think back that far to myself in my early thirties with one tiny baby who somehow dominated all my time.

Aden was a great training baby, though.  She was easy and healthy and sweet.  We still had to deal with vomit and diapers and poop and spit up and sleepless nights and croup and weird rashes and teething and all the other things that go into life with a baby–I have not forgotten the endless work of new parenting and am not romanticizing it, but Aden was unusually patient for a baby.  Whatever mistakes we made she was kind to us about.  She looked at us trustingly with her beautiful blue eyes and forgave us with smiles as we tried to figure out what we were doing.  She gave lovely little hugs that barely reached around part of my neck.

Now that tiny little baby comes up to my chin and jabbers on the phone with her friends and watches her little brother for short stretches if her dad and I both need to go out.  It’s…. unbelievable sometimes.

Aden just hosted her first sleepover for her party.  It went exceedingly well.  Well enough that I won’t try to talk her out of another one.  It helped that the girls were all on the first floor at the back of the house, and Ian and I sleep on the second floor in the front.  Rumor has it they stayed up until 2, but I didn’t hear anything and all the girls took care of themselves just fine.  It also helps that I genuinely like all of Aden’s friends.  I was even impressed as we were making pizza and eating cake to discover that most of them were fans of Dr Who, liked the Marx Brothers, and the movie they put in to watch when the rest of us went to bed was The Princess Bride.  (I was tempted to stay up and watch it with them, but I know I would have just brought down the mood by being unable to resist coming up with boring rules about where they could or could not spray their silly string.)  We keep a mirror ball in our living room (what? you don’t?), so that got some use in a game of freeze dancing.

There was also a game Aden invented called ‘Clemen-toss’ that involved rolling clementines onto a target.  (The rule in our house is yes, you may juggle the clementines, but you must then eat whatever you drop.)

I had trouble with the cake this time, though.  I wanted to try something new and it wound up being a learning experience.  Which is another way of saying a time consuming annoyance, but one I volunteered for so I can’t really complain.  (Although at the time I got very whiny, and Aden was the mature one saying, “It doesn’t matter what it looks like, it will still taste good!”)

Aden didn’t have any ideas at first for her own cake, so I suggested we do a checkerboard cake, but with all different colors inside instead of just two.  Sort of a rainbow checkerboard.  The idea is you have three round layers, each with three concentric circles in them that when stacked the right way look like a checkerboard when you cut into the whole thing.  I did that once for Aden when she was two back before there were kits for doing it, and I just piped the batter into the pans using a ziploc bag.  I picked up an actual jig for making checkerboard cakes a while back and wanted to try it, and doing it in lots of colors sounded fun.

We just made some basic white cake from a box and added food coloring.  But white cake is not as hearty as something like chocolate, and the top layer just fell apart when I put it on.  Not good.  I ended up scraping it off, along with the custard filling between the layers and had to send Ian out to the store for more cake mix.  I remade the custard and the top layer, but you can see the failed bit on the table.

The original plan was to pour chocolate ganache over the whole thing, but it was all too lumpy and gappy to try that with, so I found a chocolate butter cream frosting recipe online to use instead.  The frosting spread like a dream but tasted a little strong, and that particular recipe made a TON of frosting.  (But I was glad I saved it because I had to make a last minute cake for Mona to take to class for a party.)

Frosting hides a lot of sins.
After I suggested the checkerboard cake, Aden came up with some concept of a sheet cake in the shape of a dragon, but not like her sister had last year.  She wanted to draw a shape and cut it out, but she wanted the checkerboard thing too, even though I said that wouldn’t really work right that way.  She ended up drawing a dragon with frosting onto the finished cake.  (Which WordPress isn’t letting me download a photo of for some reason….)

Aden’s getting pretty good with her own baking and decorating skills.  She made her own cupcakes to take to school this year.  White cupcakes dipped in chocolate ganache, and then she made butter cream frosting and did all the decorating herself.  I showed her how to use different piping tips and then she did it all on her own (with some help from Quinn in the chocolate quality control department).

Anyway, the checkerboard cake sort of worked.  I think I know how to do it better next time with less grumbling and fewer trips to the store.

The kids all liked it and it tasted good, so that was all that really mattered.  It was a tasty kind of experiment.

And did I mention my daughter is ten?  Wow I love that girl.  Best decade ever.  Can’t wait to see what the next one holds in store.