Adventures In Ambitious Shortcomings

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Once upon a time, when I was younger, I used to make fancy cakes for my nephews (and occasionally other family members), often accommodating specific requests.  For example, one of the nephews once requested a “Dig Dug themed chocolate cake with raspberry filling and a surprise inside.”  Well, I had no idea what Dig Dug was, so off to Pinterest I went.  Turns out it’s an old-school video game with very pixelated characters.

So I found an image on Google, printed it, cut it out, and then used it as a template to cut colored pieces of fondant, which I layered onto the top of the cake.  The cake itself was chocolate with raspberry filling and a hole cut in the center, which I filled with M&Ms.  It looked okay, it was fun to do, and the nephew was thrilled.

I made some other cakes over the years, including a couple Lego-themed cakes and one Harry Potter cake that I’m still quite proud of.  What I did not do was take and save any decent pictures, which is a pity.  Of late, I’ve had a hard time motivating myself to make fancy cakes but since this winter was my mother’s 80th birthday, I thought I might scrape the bottom of the barrel to see if any cake ambition was left.  And I’ve always rather wanted to try making a geode cake.  For the record, this image from Google is the sort of thing I had in mind.

I will offer a tiny hint (which might have helped me) that when you start typing “geode cake” into the Google search box, the second option that comes up is “geode cake fail,” which if perused, perhaps might have prevented me from making certain…ummmmm…poor choices.  For example, my color choices of pink and red.  No, I’m not going to elaborate on that. Google it yourself.

Anyway.  Moving on…I asked my mother about flavor choices and she ended up choosing the ever-popular chocolate cake with raspberry filling.  So I used two boxes of cake mix to make 4 9” circular cake layers, let them cool, and then leveled them with my Wilton cake leveler. Then I used quite a lot of seedless raspberry jam between the layers.  So far, so good.

After that, things started to go awry.  I’d ordered some red rock candy off Amazon.  Two pounds of it, in fact.  I have no idea what I’m going to do with the rest of it, since I’m currently off the idea of geode cakes.  But since I’d picked light red/dark pink rock candy to go with the raspberry filling, I thought I might as well do pale pink buttercream frosting.  I will say that this would have looked better with white frosting, and better still with white fondant.  But I don’t think fondant tastes very good so I seldom use it, and I was enchanted with the idea of a nice blush pink buttercream.  So…things went downhill.

My mother took a cake decorating class one glorious spring in my childhood.  She came home every week with a new cake.  They were fantastic!  And I did learn some things from her, among them the fact that if you are tinting frosting, you add gel food coloring (not that liquid stuff you find at the grocery store) very gradually.  You can always add more, but you can’t take it away once it’s mixed in.  I did remember this advice but disregarded it entirely by putting quite a lot of pink gel food coloring into my buttercream frosting all at once.  And as it slowly mixed in and mixed in and mixed in, I had plenty of time to appreciate just how badly I’d gone wrong with the coloring.  But unless I wanted to do it over again, I was stuck with the bright pink color.  And since I was making this late at night the day before the cake was to be served, I didn’t think I had time (and I definitely didn’t have the energy or inclination) to make a new batch of buttercream.  Bright pink it would be.

First, I did a crumb coating of frosting, and then set the cake in the fridge for 20 minutes.  Then, I cut out a sliver from the side and top (my “geode cave”), crumb coated that, and popped it back in the fridge for another 20 minutes.  Then a proper layer of frosting all over the cake that I smoothed out as best I could (which is to say, it wasn’t very smooth) and also a generous helping inside the “cave” I’d made, so that I could get the rock candy to stick.  And then I started sticking pieces of the rock candy into the little cave area.  I got the area mostly covered, but the bright pink frosting was still visible in a number of places.  Looked ghastly.  Back into the fridge for 20 minutes.

While that was firming up, I dug out some edible gold luster dust I had hidden in amongst the cake decorating supplies, dumped a little of it into a small bowl, added a smidge of vodka, and mixed it up.  Once the cake was chilled again, I used a little paint brush (again, from the cake decorating supplies…I didn’t use any of my paint-riddled art brushes) to paint gold around the outside edge of the little geode cave.  And then, I flicked more gold inside the cave area to cover up any of the pink frosting that was showing inside.  Honestly, once I’d added a bunch of gold, it looked better.  I also added a few rock candy crystals onto the cake plate outside the geode cave area, just for fun.  And then I flicked gold onto them too.  Why not?

So, bottom line is that the cake looked extremely amateurish (I think that’s the kindest thing I can say about it) and nothing at all like the lovely geode cake I’d envisioned after a scroll through Google Images, but it tasted great.  And once we added the toppers, lit the candles, and turned down the lights (the reduced lighting was key), it looked fun and festive.  And did I mention it tasted great?