End of the Deep Freeze

New Yorkers are so funny. In the end, I guess it isn't even just New Yorkers, but any human being who, after countless days of 32 degrees or below, thinks that the one 48 degree day warrants shorts, short sleeves, no coats, etc. I saw soooo many people today wearing any combination of the aforementioned clothing items and I had to smile. I actually am wearing a skirt today and I wore my spring coat, so I am no better than the others. I decided after sweating on the overheated bus yesterday morning in my down coat that I was not going to repeat that experience again.

Yesterday was Mardi Gras, otherwise known to us German speakers as Carneval (Fasching). My German meet-up group had a Fasching party last Thursday night and we were instructed to show up in costume. I didn't have anything, so I stopped into Ricky's, this crazy beauty product store that also has a wide variety of costumes, t-shirts with random sayings and cowboy hats. I found a mask obviously left over from Halloween (see the giant spider on it?), but decided to buy it anyway, as it was definitely the best one of the lot. Kerstin accompanied me to the party sporting her own purple and black wig and some tinsel, to which she later added a feathered mask and a set of Jaegermeister beads she won in a contest. It was particularly cold that night and was the day after our little "snow storm", so the party wasn't as packed as it had promised to be. We still had a fine time though.

Cakes!

Finally, the pictures you've been waiting for!

So yeah, that's the GIANT crack I mentioned in my last post. Still lovely though.

The present cakes that were almost baby blocks.

The proud papa cutting the cake.

Betty Crocker wannabe

This week was a full week of baking for me. There were two occasions for the recent cake frenzy: a baby shower for my colleague Michael and his wife and my colleague Natalie's birthday. I offered to bake a cake for Michael's shower because I thought it would be fun to make something fancy, like a baby carriage or a rocking horse or whatever. That idea was partially foiled when my mom checked out her ancient cut-out cake cookbook and discovered there were no patterns for baby shower cakes. So I went to the internet, where one expects to find everything and I again had very little luck. In the end I decided to use a picture of a "quilt cake" that I found as inspiration for my own creation. The cake required no cutting, but it did require a LOT of frosting. Yum! I enlisted my colleague Amanda to help with the cake and she got all excited about turning one of them into baby blocks, so we actually made two cakes.

Monday night I baked the cakes: one chocolate, one white. I originally intended to use the white cake for the baby blocks and the chocolate cake for the "quilt". The thing was that the chocolate cake, baked in my new 9"x13" Wilton cake pan, turned out very flat...it couldn't have been more than two inches tall. As I got thinking about it on Tuesday, I decided that the short cake would look stupid and that I needed to make a second chocolate cake so I could layer them.

Amanda and I left work at about 3:45 PM on Tuesday to get to my place, bake the third cake and start decorating the others. After some discussion, Amanda persuaded me to use the white cake in a single layer for the quilt and use the first chocolate cake for the baby blocks, meaning I wouldn't need the third cake, which was already baking at that point (and would become Natalie's cake!). So Amanda set to work on the baby blocks and ended up with pretty decent squares...the problem was that they were all of different heights. She decided we would make them presents instead, as no baby blocks she'd ever seen looked like those cake blocks. Meanwhile we started working on the quilt cake using the pastry bags of icing, which I'd purchased specifically for this occasion. It didn't take us long to get the hang of it and the quilt turned out really well. We did it in white, baby blue, yellow and green. The presents turned out pretty well too, although we weren't able to keep the white frosting perfectly white, what with all the chocolate cake crumbs. We even did a crumb coat and let that set before doing the next layer...it just didn't work. I'm hoping to get a couple pictures from one of my colleagues so I can post them here and you can ooooo and ahhhh over my creations.

The story doesn't end there though! The next morning, Wednesday, I had to transport these cakes to work. A colleague picked me up in a cab to spare me the bus, for which I was grateful. However, tragedy struck at some point along the way: the quilt cake must not have been held level the entire time, because when I unpacked it after arriving at work there was a massive crack straight through the center of the cake. I mean, massive. Almost from end to end the long way! I was so pissed off! There was really no camoflauging it, so I left it as it was. Next time I'll have to use a steadier tray. The presents made it intact though, and everyone was impressed with the cakes at the party.

Wednesday night I frosted the additional cake for Natalie's birthday, wrapping up around 12:30 AM. What I don't do for these colleagues of mine! :) I didn't have a pattern for inspiration, so it was left to my own lame-o imagination, which resulted in purple and orange flowers and green grass. Yeah...I'll stick to picture inspiration in the future. I brought it in yesterday and then Natalie didn't even come to work because her mom was in the hospital the night before. So now it's Friday and the cake is still sitting in my cabinet at work, waiting to be eaten. Natalie's here, so we are going to do it at some point this afternoon.

Cake making is pretty stressful! I'm such a perfectionist in regard to things like this, so I think I'll put my cake decorating set to rest for a bit. The next colleague's birthday I'd make a cake for is Amanda's, and her birthday isn't until May. I'm sure I'll have recovered my desire to do this again by that point.