Birthday Baking
“Cooking is science, baking is art,” the recipe opines, sagely.
“It’s magic blinking voodoo is what it is!”
The recipe is silent on why the test cakes rose perfectly and the one I need for the birthday party sinks like someone left a baseball in the middle of the pan.
I use the off-cuts from creating a turtle shape to pad the centre and hide the whole thing under a sheet of store-bought fondant.
The former pastry chef who attends the party claims it is delicious. I’m pretty sure his new career should be on the stage, not building houses.
Extroduction
One of the things I remember most vividly about birthdays as a child, was that my parents would bake and decorate cakes for us, often to quite intricate designs. I had a dream that I would do that same for my own kids, but it turns out my baking skills aren’t up to my Mum’s. The above story is entirely true.
A few years later, I baked a spherical pokeball cake for the same child. The friend who loaned me the spherical cake pan assured me it was easy. She clearly has the magic voodoo touch because the Gods were not on my side. The resulting sphere was hollow without any need for me to carve out the middle. The outside was sufficiently hard that it couldn’t easily be cut with a knife. I suppose you could say it was both triumph and disaster – the children loved the effect of it bursting open to reveal pokemon and sprinkles inside, but they didn’t eat much.
These days, I buy the cakes. Sometimes I decorate them myself. Sometimes I leave that to the experts too!
elmowrites 