Cake

In case you're wondering-carrying a double layer cake around on the train during rush hour is a somewhat terrible idea.

I know this, because yesterday was the first of a class series I'm taking on cake decorating. It's a six hour, two part course, and we were required to bring a cake with us to class. I didn't think I'd have time to take my slowww T home, get my cake, drive to class, find parking and then look for the classroom we were meeting in. Instead, I decided to lug my cake around on a plate wrapped in saran wrap. I have a glorious, super intense cake carrier that I wanted to bring, but it's enormous and would pretty much take up an entire other person's worth of space on the T so I went old school.

Thankfully, my cake made the journey just fine (unless you count me messing up the bottom of one of the layers before it even made it out of the house) and I arrived at class it plenty of time to obnoxiously eat my dinner and generally cause a scene before we got started.

As soon as we'd all arrived, we set to work making the instructors recipe for butter cream frosting, unfortunately using Crisco in place of butter (Crisco makes me want to vomit. . .sorry, but it does!) I won't lie, I was pretty cocky in those beginning stages, whipping my Crisco like a pro and converting teaspoons into tablespoons like I'd been doing it my whole life (actually. . .)

Leveling the cake went fine, but it was round about the time we starting crumbing our cakes that I realized I'd overestimated my cake frosting skills. And furthermore, I'd made a sort of dumb error. You see, because I'm pretty cheap, I haven't invested in any good round cake baking pans, I just use these cheapo disposables with scalloped edges. Cute for cakes thrown together for friends' birthdays. Not so cute when you're trying to learn how to perfectly frost a cake with butter cream; so precise that it looks like fondant. 

Fashion before practicality is often my Achilles heel.(as my friends about the time I walked up a mountain in $50 gold, crinkle, madden girl sandals. . .)

I did what I could with my cake and the frosting I had while staring with envy at my classmates cakes around the room. I think I did a pretty admirable job for my first go at the perfect base cake frosting but, as the old saying goes, the frosting's always smoother on somebody elses cake.

Anyway, here's the finished product:

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  Psyche! My cake is not nearly this exciting. it's just a white frosted cake waiting for all the exciting frill of next weeks class. But you can imagine it basically looks like this. . .basically.