It was also their combined birthday parties - with the event being fairly spaced between their respective birthdates. The Mothership took it upon herself to cook for the entire crowd - something that even I would not undertake!
An occasion like this of course, calls for a special dessert; a special challenge fit for 30 years of marriage. A coworker suggested, "why don't you make them a 3-tiered cake? One for each celebration!" Yes! Genius! Why hadn't I thought of that?
Oh yeah, because I've never made a tiered cake before.
Well. It tasted great! I admit, it was a little lopsided on the top, but I am overall quite pleased with how it turned out. I showed another friend my 'original' sketch - and how far it was from reality! I suppose some things only come from practice. I had originally wanted to do a buttercream frosted cake (that's a LOT of buttercream) but decided to go with whipped cream instead. Yes, it's a little lighter and easier to make, but you lose so much structural and visual integrity. It doesn't hold shape very well, and you could see my fingermarks all over it! The reason I went with whipped cream is because the middle layer was carrot cake. (bottom was chocolate mousse, top was black forest) How weird would that be to have carrot cake with buttercream? I did do a cream cheese filling, but I drew the line at the frosting.
Another change I had to make was with the writing - without a proper tilting turnable, it is impossible to do nice writing on whipped cream cake! Thus, I put to use some Mercken's wafers I had on hand. It's kind of hard to describe exactly what Mercken's wafers are...umm...candy coating? Kind of like...chocolate, but without the tempermental nature of chocolate! They are really easy to melt and color and harden SUPER quickly. I melted and coloured some, spread it thin on a Silpat and cut out circles - onto which I piped out the messages. Much more easy to handle, and conveniently enough, patched up all the sketchy areas on my cake! Haha! I cut out smaller circles to decorate the cake with, and it turned out quite whimsical, and it turns out, my colour choices were SPOT ON (haha, get it? SPOT on? Ehhhh....) as the tablecloth & Mothership's outfit was purple!
Take a look for yourself!
(thanks to H-izzo for the cake-tography!)
Needless to say - I think I'm done with cake for a little while :P
Can I take the credit for being the genius who suggested that??? :p
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