Toot Toot

What was that? Oh nevermind, that was just the sound of my own horn.

*Toot Toot*

So I'm back to being a Domestic Diva, or a DD in Training, or crap maybe I just have the skills of an apprentice. Or a five year old.

Last year, I really tried to impress Marty by making his favorite cookie cake for his birthday and had my first attempt with molding fondant. I don't claim to be an artist (did you see my cartoon drawing in the post below???) so I guess I can't say I was actually surprised when nobody could tell what it was that I tried to recreate. But seriously though, to give myself some credit, making 3-d figures out of that crap was not as easy as you may think. Unlike Ace of Cakes, I didn't spend my childhood playing with clay.

So this go around, I promised myself (and him) that I'd make a cake that would top last year's. I really like to set the bar high for myself. I knew that fondant wasn't the way to go, so I would try my hand at using icing and tips. Alright, alright - this is a total amateur cake, but I'm pretty damn proud of myself for it being the first cake I've ever tried to make look decent. Usually I just bake a boxed cake, never take it out of the pan and leave a fork in the baking dish for when I'm ready for my next bite, so this is really a step forward.

Little did I know this was going to be such a process. A week long process.

Thankfully Danette informed me that I can make my homemade icing up to two weeks prior to using it and that it will stay nice and fresh the whole time. Fabulous. So Monday night, I got to whipping and churning and mixing and I got my homemade icing. But it was white. So I had to get out the fancy icing dyes I had gotten and start mixing in colors. You think you put a lot of color in your mix, but once you mix it up, you realize it hardly even turned colors. There was a LOT of mixing involved. Wednesday night, I decided I should go ahead and bake the cakes to allow them time to cool and such. I baked two cakes to layer them with icing in between. Yes, the bottom cake isn't as tall as the top cake, but that's because I had to "modify" it a little bit. Oh, give me a break - it's my first time. So last night was the final chore in this very time-consuming process. It was time to get my icing baggies, couplers, tips and icing and start to decorate my cake. Damn, did my hands get tired of all that squeezing. If you look real closely (please don't) I got really tired on the sides, so they aren't that neat. Who am I kidding, they're not neat at all, but he won't notice or care. I had originally intended on putting a deer-shaped cookie on top but the cookie baked into some puffy mess and all the details of the deer were just lost. Luckily, I had a back up plan.

Later last night when he called me, I told him he owes me big time for spending TWO HOURS in a mess more commonly known as cake icing. He doesn't know what it looks like, he just knew I spent a lot of time on it. Funnily enough, I spent more time trying to mold that damn fondant last year than I did icing a cake. Either way, his response was

"2 hours? You spend 2 hours on a cake? I'm not worth that much!"

Yeah, no shit! But I didn't have the heart to tell him it really took a week, not just two hours. He better be proud of me.