Saturday, 16 July 2011

Easter: The Ugly

Contrary to popular belief, most of my cakes don't go according to plan. It is not uncommon for them to dramatically not go according to plan. In fact, from my success rate I don't know how the belief that my cake escapades normally go according to plan got accepted as a popular belief. It could only be held by those who have never, ever, ever joined me in my kitchen while I bake. Nothing goes according to plan. This is why I would never attempt a wedding cake without some serious training first.


Instead, I remain evasive about my plans beforehand and get creative about salvaging things that go wrong. So when my intended cake roll refused to roll nicely, I attempted a layer cake instead. Less fancy, but still decent and tasty, right?



I was not impressed by this. The mess was banished to the fridge while the growling and glaring and mayhem were dealt with.

That left me with a fridge full of tasty destroyed cake bits. Well, when your cake and frosting refuse to behave (the issue here was the frosting not having the right consistancy for what I wanted; that happens with butter-based frostings and me a lot), make truffles.




Seriously. Make truffles. Or as I call these, cheater truffles. You may have heard of cake balls. Same idea. So when my courage returned and the dishes were done enough for me to mess up my kitchen again, I dumped the mess into a bowl and began stirring.




I actually ended up making another chocolate cake because I needed additional crumbs to get the texture I wanted. You need a mixture that can be molded without oozing or falling apart, something along the lines of 1/2 cup of buttercream-type frosting to the crumbs of a 9 inch cake. Anyway, make mixture, chill, shape balls, and chill some more.




These however, need more prettying up than a roll in chopped nuts. So I opted to do a little chocolate-dipping.




I'm terrible at dipping things in chocolate. While I'm okay with the fact that Wilton's products aren't to be found around here, at least they make chocolate pieces intended for this sort of thing. I attempted to temper the chocolate, though without a thermometer I'm not sure how good a job I did.


oh, shiny chocolate . . .

1 comment:

Super Pi said...

The Friendly Hero is sitting on my lap and he saw the pictures and he told me that it that they look like his poop. I thought I would share since you're talking about "the ugly".

I need to tell you I'm am always impressed that if something doesn't turn out, you still find ways to use it and get it to work--just not in the form you were originally planning. I can't always do that when it doesn't turn out because I'm so depressed that I didn't make what I wanted.

FH now wants to type to you too:
jfhdscijkih khud hij jhg iukj dsf