The main conclusion that I came to after two whole days of baking was that if I do this for any sort of living, I'm really going to need another mixer. Mixing batter and frosting for strawberry cupcakes, chocolate cupcakes, lemon cupcakes, red velvet cake, coconut cake, and brownies means that I washed that sucker 11 times. 11 times in a day! And that's not counting all the other bowls and prep dishes I had to reuse time and again. I really hate dishes.
After the monster week of fondant disaster, I didn't have the gumption to do anything stellar with the decorations--plus, it wasn't in her budget. I made blue, yellow, and purple molded chocolate flowers for the strawberry cupcakes, but I just relied on pastel metallic sprinkles for the chocolate cupcakes, and yellow and orange decorating sugar on the lemon cupcakes. I covered the coconut cake in--what else?--coconut, and I shaved some mild German chocolate to rim the red velvet cake.
I have to admit, when I went to the open house I had moments when I felt like a rock star. I had people seek me out and ask if I had made "my" red velvet cake because they had heard all about it and wanted some... but yet again, over and over, people said, "oh, YOU made those brownies? Those are crazy fantastic!" The irony of this is that I don't even enjoy eating brownies. They are usually last on my long, long list of crave-able sweets. Theoretically I earned some future specialty business from the event, but none of it has hit yet.
Around the Fourth of July, I decided I wanted to make a stacked cake. I made a few mistakes, though, and the cake wasn't stiff enough for stacking. I ended up scrapping a whole cake (poor Sean...he had to help me eat the leftovers). My original plan was to make red velvet and "blue suede" and cover it in red cream cheese frosting with white stripes, but alas... it was not meant to be. In the end, I just made a blue suede sheet cake with red cream cheese frosting, white filling, and white fondant stars. Sean said that he actually had a few people come up to him and ask permission to cut the cake because they thought it looked too nice to cut into. I'm not sure what the commentary was on the name of the cake (I thought it was pretty witty), but apparently they thought it was delicious.
Sean's little brother Anthony came out to visit us over the Fourth of July weekend, and his birthday is coming up this month. I told him I would make him any sort of cake he wanted (and though Sean was in the background trying to pressure him into asking for red velvet), he chose chocolate cake with peanut butter frosting. And.... of course I biffed the cake. I inadvertently turned the oven off when I was setting the timer, so by the time I got it reset and the oven back up to temperature, the cake that resulted turned out dry, dry, dry. And I also learned another hard lesson--"natural" peanut butter, which has zero hydrogenated ingredients, makes HORRIBLE peanut butter frosting. It's granular and separates and looks completely unappetizing (we're talking like something you'd find in a baby diaper unappetizing) and is just generally no good. I stood there, looking at the mixing bowl in perplexity, wondering how in the HECK I was going to fix this, when brilliance struck. It wasn't working because nothing was hydrogenated, right? Or even partially hydrogenated? So obviously, I needed to add hydrogenation. Fantastic! Half a cup of shortening later, and it was a creamy dream. Of course, I couldn't tell that the cake was a chocolate Sahara until we cut into it, at which point I lamented the death of a good cake. But Anthony, bless his soul, said, "Jill, I didn't even notice. I'm not a cake expert or anything, so it's fine!" Sean wisely said nothing at all, and just poured some milk on his cake. Me? I skipped the milk and went straight to the Baileys. Anything can be fixed with alcohol.
I don't think Sean ever got over his red velvet cake craving, so he told Anthony to ask me to make another cake, because apparently I can't say no to Anthony (and as though I would ever say no to Sean???). This whole red velvet kick of his has taken me by surprise. I mean, I'll admit that it's a dang tasty cake. But his hands-down favorite has always been spice.
"Is this your new favorite, or something? I would figure you would ask for spice," I said.
"Well, can't you kind of mix them both?" he asked?
"Hm.....," I replied.
So I did. I made some sort of super delicious red velvet spice hybrid. It was moist, delicious, and perfect with its sloppy cream cheese frosting. Sean took a bite, and said, "Ok, you've redeemed yourself." Anthony, mindful of my feelings, told me that it was delicious and very moist, but "the chocolate cake was good, too."
After work on Monday, Sean came home and asked if I was in a baking mood. Apparently, he needed to bring treats to his meeting with the State, and he told his team he would check with me. I really didn't feel like baking, but like I hinted earlier.... I can't say no to Sean. So out of my entire repertoire of cake, what does he ask for? The red velvet spice hybrid again. I made 48 minis, some of which didn't make the cut because of symmetrical problems, and at least three of which Sean and I ate. But after I was done frosting them, I only had about 23. 23?? Where did the rest of them go? I just shrugged it off as really bad math (if I had eaten that many calories, so I didn't want to think about it) and cleaned up. After all, Sean really only needed about 16. Well, when I was going to bed, I noticed a whole cooling rack of mini cakes that I had set aside and missed. After I got over my relief that I didn't unconsciously inhale 20 mini cupcakes, I froze them. I really didn't want to frost more at midnight. When Sean came home that night with the empty cupcake carrier, I asked him if the cupcakes went over well. He nodded his head and kind of rolled his eyes in a little bit of exasperation and told me that he nearly had a mutiny on his hands when one of the teams thought they wouldn't be able to get any. Next time I'll be sure to send the full 40. And something tells me that I should start charging Sean. He would have just spent the money at Dunkin' Donuts anyway, right?
And you know what I did every single stinkin' time before I turned on the oven? I opened it up and checked it out first. Even though I knew... I knew there was nothing in it. Yes, yes.... I can be taught.
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