Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Something's Fishy

Big Girl J has recently gotten bigger! She turn 4! Last weekend we celebrated with all of her preschool friends and our friends and family. That actually made for a very big crowd! Seems Big Girl J has more friends than mommy and daddy!
We do not have a large house, just a large yard. So the weather of any decide BBQ we host is very important. The children don't do very well crammed into one room, that seem to turn into a small tornado and just tear up the whole room. So having a week of questionable weather for Saturday, we were grateful when the weather dude said Saturday should be the best day of the weekend with a break from the wind and chance of showers. Well, some how, weather dude turned out correct, at least for the time while the birthday party was happening.
I love smoking meat, I love brisket. However time barely offers that option. So when we find a reason to invite over more than a few friends, we buy brisket and smoke it! 35 pounds of brisket later.... The kids had a blast and the adults enjoyed the food.
Oh yes, on to the cake! Big Girl J had decided on a fish themed party a few weeks prior. I had decided on a cake 'style' a few weeks prior also. The problem with making a cake for myself, I mean my family. I tend to cut corners. Well don't let me get ahead of myself.
I wanted to try a technique called color flow. It is basically royal icing, powdered sugar and water with a color flow powder mixture, that dries rock hard. I printed coloring book pictures of fish found with searching just that on the internet.
I put wax paper over the printed pictures, outlined it with a thicker mixture of the color flow icing. Let it dry for about a day, then filled in the outline with a much thinner mixture of the color flow. The thin icing kind of floods the outline. You can see where some of it went over the outline, but this was my first try. Unfortunately, my cake tried to step over this pan with no success and stepped on a few pieces, after they had dried. So they shattered :( My fault, I had her food on the counter and didn't put these away that night. So I save the three or four that survived and whipped up another batch.

I was a bit happier with round two. I was able to make them a bit thicker and I think they looked better over all. Now onto the cake and where I cut corners. When pre-stacking the cakes I realized the base cake was not thick enough in comparison to the top 2 tiers. So I decided to make the cake a little off set, maybe like a coral reef, yeah that's it, I'll off set each cake so that it will look like a coral reef!
Unfortunately, I didn't have any dowel rods to support stacking the cake, so it began to lean, and just before cutting I was certain it would fall if left up to gravity much longer!
This picture was taken prior to the big lean. Of course when the cake tastes good, it doesn't matter if it leans....
The aftermath.... And about 2 minutes later that chocolate cake was gone!

4 comments:

  1. And a good time was had by all! (I love that cake!)

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  2. The cake looked mah-velous! Wish I could give her a happy b-day hug!

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  3. Again great cake and wonderful design. Really hard work and concentration needed to make it. I am waiting for next cake.
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  4. The cake was a CREATION, and it looked like everyone had such a good time. It was so fun to watch Jolene among her posse of pre-school peeps!

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