high-bar baking

I think two additional artists featured on a track is usually one too many. And I think I heated the candy melt too much.

The Irish survived Georgia to advance to the CFP semifinal round. (“Survived?!”, you say, “they won 23-10!” Yes, survived. Clearly you are not an Irish fan if you think we were comfortable for even one moment before the clock hit triple zeroes.) 

This means that we will be playing in Miami, against Penn State. We’re so banged up that this flock of injuries might finally be a bridge too far. But they’ve been saying that all season, and here we still are. Penn State’s beatable. We’re beatable.

This is why you play the games. 

And this is why I make the cakes. I’m silly, I know, but I wanted to up the ante for this game. For the first round, I made macarons. For the second, I made a two-layer cake. This time around, I pulled the German buttercream out of my freezer from before Christmas (have I told you about German buttercream yet? Pastry cream that is made into frosting. For those who know pastry cream, no explanation is necessary. For those who don’t, no explanation will suffice) and I made a three-tier cake. This is the Two Chicks Sour Cream Chocolate Cake. 

And I knew better. It calls for a tablespoon of baking soda, for goodness’ sake. But I made a note of it last time at the bottom of the page, instead of next to the baking soda line. This time I put a note where I know I’ll look for it next time. They were a little collapsed and a little squat. What do you expect? 

I wanted to do a football version of Preppy Kitchen’s Bat Cake. My trial run was with chocolate chips when I was bored (and dreaming) last week. I threw the footballs in the freezer, and I thought they were really tender and fragile as they came back up to room temperature. Now I realize that was likely because they were wet as condensation landed on them when they were warming up, but that’s neither here nor there. I bought candy melt because that’s what Kanell calls for, and that’s what I used this time. It certainly hardens like a dream. Yay! But I heated it way too much. It was oozing and seeping everywhere. A five minute stint in the fridge helpe but did not cure all ills. It’s just a weird-textured food. Stretchy, almost. I had a hard time finishing clean lines, and it was still kinda goopy and drizzly. 

I made do, though. My arrangement of footballs could use some work (I tried a couple configurations), but I was most definitely pleased with the upright one that stayed upright on top. I also liked how nice “Go Irish!” looked when I piped it onto parchment and then just placed it on the cake. If I’d have needed a do-over, I had as many chances as I wanted. I also learned why cake decorators go to the trouble of piping elaborate chocolate designs onto long acetate strips and making a cake collar before oh-so-delicately taking off the mold. When you pipe onto a flat surface, shockingly, your footballs don’t conform to the curved sides of a cake. 

It was a soft cake, so it’s in the fridge firming up. 

Not that anyone in the office (except maybe a rogue Penn State alum?) is going to care about any of these details in the slightest.