high-bar baking

The lessons are always the same, huh?

Give yourself more space

Slow down

Do the dishes first

Don’t set your cake in the sun

Ok, that one was new. I made Zoë’s yellow cake with Sarah’s fudgy chocolate frosting, sans the corn syrup because there is literally no reason to include it. It’s already too sweet, and I can taste the cloyingness — why can’t you??

Then I decorated with an attempt at Zoë’s chocolate bark. The effect of her version is much more beautiful, because she swoops them tall and they add gorgeous height to the cake. My cake holder has a rim height of 5 inches, so swooping and gorgeous was not in the cards last night. 

I should have laid out more wax paper on more baking sheets. I should have known I wanted two rows, and traced 5 inch marks twice instead of eyeballing the second set, chocolate already in hand. I probably could have waited for the chocolate to cool before starting to paint. And good lord I did not need to use the amount I melted. Although I did need every stripe I ended up making, even the failed and frayed ones. An eight inch cake has a wide perimeter, man. 

So it only looked ok. I had a hard time getting the thinner sections up, and my thumb burned holes through more than one of them. I’m not cut out for this life; my hands are too shaky to be a doctor and too warm to be a pastry chef. 

Then I set the poor boy next to my desk at work, and the sun did a number on it in the afternoon. The chocolate, too, was not meant for this world. 

The cake uses too many eggs and yolks. Is there any yellow cake I truly love? I cut the leavening and it almost didn’t rise enough in the middle? 

Another “before” picture, it seems. Perhaps I will have a year’s worth of them.

Luckily, no one cares what the cake looks like. They never have.