Cake-tastic!

I've been waiting for it for awhile now.

A few weeks back Ashley and her roommate Mel decided that pie had it's day in the sun (3/14) but cake was always sad and alone in the rain. But no longer! We would have a celebration of cakes! And it would be marvelous!

At first they had scheduled the Cake Party for a day I was going to be in Virginia. Then it was rescheduled and suddenly I was actually home that weekend!

I asked ahead of time if they would prefer a strawberry cake or a chocolate Nutella cake since I already had those cakes made and chilling in my freezer from my Wilton Course 1 classes that I missed.

So I spent most of Saturday morning frosting my chocolate Nutella cake while watching Fly Away Home. Let me just go on the record saying I heart Anna Paquin and the movie still totally makes me cry at the end when all the geese land in their new safe happy home.

Anyway, drove into Manhattan (which is always a joy) and got to Ashley's apartment near Inwood more or less around the time I meant to. She knew most of her friends would be on the late side but assumed correctly that I'd leave to make it on time but get stuck in traffic. How well people know my punctuality.

Let me just say, when the cakes started pouring in we all got more and more excited. We started off with meatloaf cupcakes with sweet potato frosting. Sounds disgusting but is actually quite delicious. Ash's sweet potatoes were amaaaaazing.

Then we munched on mini pancake muffins which you could chose to dip in syrup. Greatest idea ever for a brunch or something with friends. They taste good even if they're not hot and right out of the oven and they're all ready at once instead of actual pancakes which take forever to cook and some will be cold and you don't get to eat together.

We had quite the selection of cakes to gorge ourselves on. Also, cake shots, need I say more on how enjoyable the evening was? I think I do...

Courtney (my fellow EMACer who I haven't seen since graduation in 2007) brought a 7-layer rainbow cake. Of course the nerd in her (which we all appreciated) had the layers in ROYGBIV order. It was beautiful to cut into.

I'm awful with names but another one of Ash's friends brought a giant cupcake cake. Another brought a fruit cake (aka a fruit torte) and someone else brought some gourmet cupcakes from a famous bakery in NYC that I can't recall the name of but my Dad managed to guess. Mel also made a delicious applesauce cake with cream cheese frosting.

Holy crap I love cake. And it was so great to catch up with Courtney and her manfriend James and meet all of Ashley's friends who I can now put a face to their names when she tells me stories.

Cake Party = Success!

I decided we needed to take this picture. Allow me to explain. Senior year the three of us must have had about 5 different classes together. It makes sense we were all the same major with the same concentration. So to celebrate our last day as seniors and our last EMAC class together, we decided to all gather in my apartment and have a power hour.

So here we were, all in the same place for the first time in three years and slightly intoxicated. I think we've grown as people...

Sunday morning Ashley and I may or may not have woken up, eaten cake leftovers and watched The Lion King.

Lamb Cake Part Duex

Easter was enjoyable. I spent it with my family and we got a fantastic dinner at our favorite German Restaurant Zum Stammtisch.

Seriously, if you have any sort of German in you, or even if you just love good food, head over there. We've been going to Zum for years and years and years especially since my grandma lives so close and it's always delicious and homey.

Even Mickey loves it!

Yeah, Jaclyn brought Nanny back a German Mickey from Epcot, what about it?

Probably the most exciting thing was the chance Julibean had to try the lamb cake again. You might remember our hilarious attempt last year to try to make a lamb cake for Jason's family.

Our first try was delicious, but he was sloppy. We made him out of carrot cake (which isn't as sturdy as it should be), we didn't read the directions (and apparently made the cake entirely wrong), and we used cream cheese frosting (which didn't hold together as well as decorating frosting). Basically it was a not so epic failure.

I'd never decorated a cake before so I completely winged it and he looked as if I did (as you can see here->).

I mean Jason's family loved it. Joe enjoyed decapitating the lamb cake and he was just silly looking. This year Julibean actually read the directions, made the cake out of the proper kind of cake and she even bought little sugar eyes for him.

Lamb Cake Part Duex was adorable and so much more delicious and cute than our first attempt.

Look at 'im in his little bed of grass!

Lamb Cake success!!

Wilton Cake Update

I was holding onto my cake that I decorated on Friday. This happened for a few reasons.

Long story short, Jason's grandfather is not doing so great. He's been in the hospital for quite some time now and they stopped force feeding him/giving him his meds on Tuesday. When I say that I mean last Tuesday. The man has held on for a week without nutrition or the pills that were supposedly keeping him alive. We expected to hear word on Wednesday and were prepared for Jason to drive up to my house, his three cousins in the city to take the train to my house and the five of us to drive up to New Hampshire to be with the rest of the family. Right now these plans are on hold as we wait. It's not the greatest of situations but unfortunately this is what happens sometimes.

I planned on bringing the cake with me for the family to eat in NH.

Instead, I brought it to work since I don't want it sitting in my fridge at home for another week.

It was delicious. It was pretty. And I totally forgot to take a photo of it.

This is what is left.

The cake itself was a homemade funfetti cake with fruit preserve filling and the trademark Wilton butter-cream frosting. Problem was nobody in the office wanted to cut into it since they all thought it was so pretty. I had to do the honors and took the tiniest sliver just to see how it tasted.

This week I'm making a chocolate cake with Nutella filling and a chocolate/butter-cream/Nutella frosting. I anticipate it ALSO being delicious.

Wilton Course 1

Friday was our first Class of Wilton's Cake Decorating Course 1. It was exciting even though all we did was get an introduction from our instructor and watch her assemble, frost and decorate a cake.

I can't wait to decorate cakes and learn how to make flowers and stuff. I mean any skills I pick up will definitely make any cake I decorate in the future much better than the last one I made.

I guess what I didn't realize about this class is that we have to bake cakes and bring them to class with us to decorate. I mean, obviously what else would we be doing? But the thought escaped me at first and when Julibean and I decided it would be a good idea to bake ALL of our cakes at once and put them in the freezer (as suggested by our instructor) and mix ALL of our frosting at once and put it into smaller containers to take to class with us...I didn't think it would be such a daunting task.

I was so wrong! So.very.wrong.

Julibean and I literally spent the entire length of the Super Bowl (plus a few hours ahead of and after) baking cakes and trying to mix frosting. When Wilton says stiff frosting, they mean stiff frosting. It almost burned out our stand up mixer, it was scary.

But we'll frosting and constructing a cake to bring to class next Friday. We're decorating the top with a rainbow of piped icing and learning how to make borders. I figured since it'll be a rainbow on the outside it should be one on the inside too and made funfetti cake. They didn't have any actual funfetti cake mix at the store so I made white cake and threw some sprinkles in to the mix.

Basically I'm just super excited to learn these new skills and everyone who I've mentioned this course to seems just as excited for me. Plus I told everyone in the office I'll be bringing in random cakes each Monday to work so they're excited about that too.

Size Really Matters

...when it comes to penis cookies, it definitely does!

That's right, I said it. And that's right, we did go there.

Last night the Beaner and I baked penis cookies for Jaclyn's bachelorette party on Saturday. Now, our lovely sousin is NOT the type of girl to do any of the following:

• Go clubbing
• Go out drinking
• Be humiliated in public
  
• Enjoy a stripper's junk in her face

So because Jaclyn is quite tame we decided on a spa day, dinner and then a girly sleepover filled to the brim with 80s classics like Pretty in Pink and Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. However, we still gotta have a little ridiculousness and that is why we chose to make penis cookies and cock-cakes. (Yes, we have a penis shaped cupcake pan that my sister bought which lead to priceless phrases from my mother like, "The penis pan really needs to come off the kitchen counter.")

Apparently penis cookie cutters are a little harder to come by and although Julibean had the original thought of buying a dog bone cookie cutter and improvising from there, we wound up doing free-style peni.

Hilarity ensued.

Not only did we make them FAR too big and they merely flattened into blobs, but the running commentary from my mother was quite incredible.

"I think I've said the word penis more times in the past hour than I have in my entire life."

I really do love my mother sometimes. Despite the fact that while we were forming these inappropriate cookies she was trying to give us an anatomy lesson...never fails when you have a science teacher for a mom.

Apparently penis cookie baking is more of an art form than we originally anticipated. Size really does matter and they need to be made very very tiny. Minuscule even. Upon realizing the first batch imploded to gargantuan sizes, I went about slicing the rest lengthwise to thin them out. Eventually I gave up and just made super tiny peni and those came out fine.

So tonight, we make cock-cakes with cream cheese frosting.

Lamb Cake

I've been the worst blogger ever. I really have no excuse except that I've pretty much lacked motivation to do anything the past few weeks.

So let's travel back to Easter. Just for shigiggles! Since my wonderful company gives us a vacation day on Good Friday, I took the opportunity to leave early on Thursday and drive up to New Hampshire to spend the long weekend with my boyfriend and his family. My mother thought it would be a fabulous idea if my sister Julianne came to meet me since she didn't want her to be alone for the holiday. The more the merrier in the Shire, eh?

We decided ahead of time that we would make Jason's family dessert so I went out shopping with Jason's sister Amanda and got all the ingredients for my Julibean's carrot cake and cream cheese frosting. None of them had every had carrot cake so it was all the more exciting!

A little back story. Easter used to be a huge holiday in my family. When we were younger my Mom would decorate almost as much as she does for Christmas and we would go out to New Jersey to spend the day in pretty dresses at my uncle's house. One of the big draws was the lamb cake. No, not a cake made out of lamb, but one shaped like a lamb. When we decided to bake for Jason's family I immediately asked my grandmother for the lamb tin (which has not made a public appearance since I was 10) and we revived the tradition.

(Please excuse the tiny poor quality photo, it's from my phone)

Voila! My first attempt ever at decorating a cake. Look at him, ain't he cute? Sitting in his little bed of grass. Best of all, he was delicious!

We had a wonderful Easter dinner on Saturday night, and then devoured the lamb soon after that. The next morning, after church we dug right into a delightfully unhealthy breakfast of delectable cinnamon rolls and then it came time for the Easter baskets.

Jason's mother is hardcore about her Easter baskets. I mean, the thing was HUGE and had full bags of candy in it. In our house Easter baskets had a chocolate bunny, a few Cadbury eggs, a handful of jelly beans and a dash of robin's eggs. Plus, you'd have the glorious task of digging through the plastic grass to find them all before my Dad came by and yoinked your eggs! So low and behold, a plethora of chocolate, and all for me!

It was intense. And not only was there a cornucopia of candies, but quite useful things like a pair of knee-highs, healthier options like a box of raisins and fruit snacks, and best of all...a trashy romance novel. Yes ladies and gentlemen, my boyfriend's mother gave me (and my sister) trashy romance novels. This woman is awesome.

Now I have never read a trashy romance novel before...ever. I laughed at them, sure, but I never legitimately read one. But low and behold, No Place for a Lady was hilariously awful. In fact, I might just review it for you.

All in all, Easter was fantastic. Spending time with Jason's family is always entertaining and having my sister there was even more wonderful.