Saturday, April 6, 2013

Mady's messages and the cake dilemma

Mady has been using part of her chore chart board as a memo board. On Myriam's birthday, after Myriam's candle was blown out, I was trying to dish up cake for everyone. 
Mady must have gotten tired of waiting because I found the following message:

It's supposed to read, 'Mom is taking forever to give me cake'. She ran out of room so she didn't get all of her message written down. 
The other day when she was at school, I noticed a message on her board that read, 'today is the day that momma is being mean'. 
Her messages make me giggle.
 **********

A few days before Myriam's birthday, I decided to make Myriam a fondant cake for her birthday. I thought if I started a few days early I would have enough time to fix any errors that might occur.
On Monday night I got busy baking the cakes. Once they were cooled, I flipped them out of the round pans. The first cake came out easy. The second cake got stuck and ripped. No big deal because I had an extra cake mix on hand. I whipped the extra cake mix up, and greased the pans extra good this time. The second time around, both cakes came out of the pans just fine.
I put the cakes in the freezer over night. 
The following day I put the chocolate pudding filling in between the layers, and did a crumb coating. I set the cake in the freezer to harden so I could put the fondant on. Everything was going as planned. 
Next was the tricky part: rolling out the fondant and putting it on the cake. Once I looked at how much fondant I needed, I realized the cake supply store hadn't given me enough fondant. I had asked the lady several times how much fondant I would need for a 9" round cake. She assured me that 1 pound would be plenty, and that I would probably have some left over for decorating if needed. When I looked at how much I would need, I realized I was about 1 lb short. I couldn't believe it. I didn't want to drive back up to Spanish Fork again, so I attempted to make it work with what I had. Bad idea to say the least. I rolled the fondant out and tried to put it over the cake, not once but 4 times. On the 4th try the fondant ended up tearing part of the top of the cake off. I was devastated. So, I cut a slice of the crumb coated, partly ripped cake, and Myriam and I enjoyed a slice. It tasted heavenly.
 
Ben came downstairs shortly after that. He could tell something was wrong. I ended up venting to him and shedding a few tears (Okay, a lot of tears). I was so frustrated. I was going to give up and just buy a bakery cake. Ben listened to me vent and then gave me a huge hug. He encouraged me not to give up. My wonderful sister in law makes beautiful cakes. I told her about my ordeal and she encouraged me not to give up either. So, I decided to give it another try. My sister in law gave me a recipe to make my own marshmallow fondant that is easier to work with (thanks Amy!).That night I ran to the store and bought all the ingredients I needed. Once my kids were tucked into bed for the night, I attempted to make another cake. Myriam woke up not long after I started. While I was nursing her back to sleep, I decided to scroll through Pinterest on my phone. I found a cake that was iced with buttercream icing and decorated with fondant. I loved the look of it. So, I decided to go in that direction instead. Once Myriam went back to sleep, I whipped up a delicious batch of vanilla almond buttercream icing. It was divine! However, I couldn't get it to spread out nice and smooth on the cake. I added more icing, took some icing off, added more icing, took more icing off, made another batch of icing, then continued to ice it some more. Finally at 3 in the morning my body was aching from sleep depravation. I decided to do a messy look, wrapped some jute in a bow around it, rolled some hot pink fondant balls and placed them around the cake, and called it a night. Here is the end result (some of you may have already seen the cake from my blog post about Myraim's birthday):


I wasn't impressed with it, but I'm glad I made her first birthday cake. It still turned out cute, even if my expectations were initially too high.
Years down the road, I hope I can laugh about all the stress and lack of sleep this cake caused.
In the end, it was worth it.

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