"Type A with no follow through"

That's what my husband described me as today. I would phrase it as "Type A but doesn't care so much", but I guess that wouldn't be much of a Type A then.

The reason is Jared's birthday cake. We're having a "birthday party" for him, basically a barbecue for our work friends where their kids are invited. He'll get a nice gift from us (a wooden kitchen) + something from his grandparents (pots/pans & wooden food), but hopefully nobody else will bring any presents. So basically we're doing it low key, no hundreds of dollars spent at the children's museum for a themed party for a kid who won't remember it by the time he's three and is perfectly happy playing with his train table for hours on end anyway.

But I decided I did want to "go all out" on one thing - the cake. He adores Thomas the Train, so I looked on ebay for a Thomas cake pan, of which there are a ton. In retrospect, that should have given me pause, more on that later. Here is the liner with the picture of the end result on it:

Beautiful, eh? I just knew he'd love it. It looked intricate, but with ten months' cake decorating experience at Baskin Robins under my belt from high school, I figured I could handle it. It's for my son, after all. And to do this proper, I also had to make the cake itself from scratch, so I looked up a recipe for fancy yellow cake in The Joy of Cooking.

I know how these things can go, so I decided to do a practice run and make the cake this weekend to ensure I had all the ingredients and knew what to do for the actual party.

Last night, I made the cake. When I say fancy yellow cake, I mean fancy. This was the kind of yellow cake where you mix two or three of the 15 ingredients separately and then carefully integrate them all ("Alternate the flour mixture in three parts with the milk mixture in two parts"). This was the kind of cake where you mix the egg yolks in the mixer, then you separately whip the egg whites and fold the results into the other mixture once the peaks are "stiff but not dry". Much to my surprise, I didn't screw up the cake. It came out smelling great, I even got it out of the pan without too much damage, and set it out to cool.

Then I left it out on the counter over night, uncovered. Oops. Oh well, as my mom pointed out, a slightly hard cake on the outside is easier to frost. Talk about lemonade from lemons. The first complexity I ran into was that the template and the picture are facing one way, but of course the cake itself faced a different way. No problem, I can handle that.

So then today, I looked up a recipe for some nice buttercream frosting and followed the instructions on the cake pan for the amounts to make and in which colors. This took a while because I had to alternate making the frosting with handling the toddler who was very curious about what I was doing but wasn't able to satisfy his curiosity from any position other than clutching onto my side.

The instructions said I'd need black, red, dark blue, light blue, white and yellow. Plus I'd need a few different tips on my cake decorating set (which was a fantastic gift we received at our wedding six years ago... and this is the first time I've used it - oops). I set out separate bowls for each color and mixed away. Except yellow. I got bored by the time I got around to yellow, I figured I'd just skip the yellow this time.

The first problem I ran into was black. It turns out that there's no easy way to mix black frosting out of what they usually sell you (RGBY). One website suggested making chocolate frosting and adding blue (nope - turns baby poop brown). Another said that it's basically impossible to get black frosting because you have to add so much color that it makes the frosting taste bitter, so you might as well give up and just buy some from the professionals.

This was just practice, so I wasn't planning on spending a huge amount of time on the decorating, I just wanted to get the gist down. So I decided I'd make do without the black frosting for this practice run and just use the baby poop brown.

After ten minutes had been spent mixing colors, filling the frosting tubes, finding the right tips... I started to get bored. Was this really a good use of my time? Boy, the steps to frost this were incredibly complex. I'd already spent five hours on the whole project by this point and was starting to wonder how much longer it would take. I decided to take some shortcuts... instead of doing individual rosettes for the blue and white all around the body, I'd just spread frosting there. Close enough and much faster, and less tip-switching. But even with that, the instructions still had many different tips for each color...and it was around this point that I decided I didn't frigging care how nice the cake looked and whipped up the following:

Now, remember I specifically decided I didn't care about black frosting for the practice cake, so you can pretend it looked like this:

Hrm, let's compare that to the original:

Oh well.

 

To my credit, when we asked Jared what it was, he immediately said "Thomas!" A two year old recognized my creation - that's my definition of success.

In retrospect, I think the reason there are so many of these cake pans on ebay is that so many people bake one cake in them, go "holy crap that's a pain in the butt" and then promptly sell the pans back. I can assure you I'll be doing the same with my cake pan. And I'm sure Safeway does something in a train theme that we can use.

All in all, it was a memorable experience. My son will have a professionally made cake, I still got to laugh at my own expense which is fun (does that mean I'm not type A? probably not) and when we eat the cake tomorrow while celebrating memorial day with the parents-in-law, I'm sure it will taste just fine, regardless of how it looks.

P.S. Anyone want to buy a Thomas the Train cake pan?

P.P.S. Somehow the cake was messed up anyway. Very dense. Oops again. All the more reason to leave it to the pros.

Comments

[mark]

Those wilton cakes are *hard*. REALLY hard. Your results were pretty good, actually, esp for a first shot.

My sister decided to make one for her daughter's first birthday, and quietly told me (in a corner, where noone else would hear) "it took me from 10pm to 3am to frost this. Mom's so going to tell me I told you so when she hears about this".

The other thing is that, if you take a look, "professional" cakes are almost never smooth frosted, for exactly the reason you ran into. They're always piped or done with those little bags and flower tips, because spreading frosting never ends up smooth.

[Kim]

Hey- I think it looks just fine. I've never been ambitious enough to do more than a rectangle cake with pretty icing on it. My thought is that it can look really bad, as long as it tastes good.

Glad to have found your bolog. I enjoy reading it!

[Cynical Mom]

Mark: Just think what I could have accomplished if I'd tried ;-) It makes me feel a lot better to know about the 5 hour frosting though, boy am I glad I saved myself that!

Kim: Thanks!

Anyone else: My sister pointed me at this train cake:

http://familyfun.go.com/recipes/special/cake/cake_train/

I might give that one a shot instead. Doesn't look too hard and it's dreadfully cute.

[Jill]

How much would you ask for the pan? I've been looking on eBay and they're asking $30....a bit much for a one-time use type of item, but my little boy has his heart set on a Thomas cake for his birthday next month. Please let me know. Thanks!

[Diane]

Thanks so much! Great story and thanks for putting this into perspective. I was just about to try the Wilton thing. Now I'll go with a much easier version I found on the net.