Creativity in cake

This past weekend was the progenitor's 50th wedding anniversary (my parents). They had a little shin-dig during their church's social hour. Dad asked for my help in getting cakes prepared. Easy you say? Well not really, you see we are gluten free (for a variety of reasons).

Initially I was going to just coordinate and purchase the baked goods. But that was before I found out the two main GF bakeries in town have basically shut down. One closed, one changed the nature of the business, and no longer offers baking services. So baking cakes was my job.

A few years ago a friend and I started to play around with baking cakes, and decorating them. Over the top decorating. While we worked we had fun and a very steep learning curve, but we didnt care. Our mantra was "what would Duff do?" As we tried to channel Duff from Ace of Cakes.

well this project didn't call for wacked out fondant creations, just some decent decorated cakes. So the plan was purchase the gluten cake, and make the GF cake. That is until I priced them out. Ouch. Im too poor these days to fork over 30 bucks for a sheet cake when box cake mix costs a buck. (Of course the GF mix is $5 a box, but hey Im just so happy it exists!)

 So the plan was spend a chunk of Thurdsay baking, Saturday decorating, Sunday eating. My plan worked well. Thursday morning went quickly. The cakes were 2 layers chocolate and vanilla each. The bake order to minimize contamination was vanilla GF, chocolate GF, chocolate then vanilla. This order also helped me to minimize excessive cleaning.

A dozen eggs, a pound of butter, four boxes of cake mix, 1 can of frosting and an hour and a half later, I had 4 cake slabs. (this is what the cakes looked like by the time I finished Thursday morning). Im well known for NOT cooking, so I was thrilled how easy that part went. Cakes went into cold storage and I went to a Duran Duran concert (Oh heck yes Im going to mention that cause at the end of the show as everyone was leaving there was a white SUV pulling out, and from where that car originated it could only be the band, everyone was getting out of the way and Im thinking its the band! Well it was and John Taylor was in the front seat and I was frozen to the ground gawping at him. He turned around and waved at me!! Hes always been my Duran favorite, so I was thrilled beyond belief--took me back 30 years in giddy!)

So after a thrilling 5 seconds of eye contact, and a long drive home on Saturday it was time to decorate the cakes. As I mentioned I have done the crazy fondant type of decorations before, after all it s simply edible polymer clay as far as my fingers are concerned. But these cakes were going to be simple basic frosting decorations.

 The first cake I did was the gluten cake. I wanted to do a yellow basket weave on the sides but using spray can icing and really not knowing what I was doing resulted in a bright yellow side with fork lines in it. I did manage to get the top ALMOST perfectly smooth.

The GF cake wasn't as tall but I did manage to figure out how to do a basket weave. And I attempted it. it actually came out pretty ok. My dad was impressed at least.

In the end I would say the cakes were a success, they were eaten!

 

As an artist I find it fun to play with different mediums. Maybe thats a problem, in that Im not very pin pointed in what I do. But with some many creative outlets available why be limited?