Cakel and Ligel

Dye all over my hands. Splatters on my glasses. A paper cut on the top of my thumb. Two cracked ribs and a broken foot. This is the result of yesterday's cake extravaganza (okay except the last two, I just thought the first three weren't quite dramatic enough).

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So I actually did something with my day yesterday, as it was my little sisters birthday! So I figured I had to bake her a cake, but what do I make for a picky seven year old? At first I thought a really pretty "princess cake" done with fondant and really nicely decorated. Then I remember the time I ate a piece of fondant in one of my baking classes. Sorry to all the bakeries (and fondant lovers) but excessive fondant tastes like poop. Yeah, I just said the word poop in a food blog.

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So instead I decided to do two cakes, the first one a plain vanilla cake with dark chocolate frosting. The second cake I chose to use the princess idea, but instead I used marzipan, because I actually like the taste of it. However, I had no idea whether or not she would like it, so that's why I decided to make two. More on that later.

I really don't know what's wrong with the picture on the left. Not that anything is wrong with it, it's just in real life the frosting looked a lot darker. Besides that, I think it looks great. I was talking to my mother about what kind of cake Madina would like, and she told me that she really enjoyed to lemon cake I earlier this month (never posted). So I basically just took the lemon zest and extract out of the recipe and added two teaspoons more vanilla.

I think it turned out well. I like practically anything made with buttermilk, but cake especially. I also really liked the color contrast between the light cake and the almost black frosting. (Do you like the new photo window thingy? I just thought I'd keep going with what I mentioned last post about keeping things interesting with the pictures.)

So here is the "princess cake" that I made, and let me say it took about 4 hours from start to finish. Why Dominic? Are you seriously that slow?? No people, I had to make the marzipan from scratch. And while that might not take that long to make marzipan, it did that me that long to make almond paste from whole almonds. First I had to blanch them and then make a sugar syrup with water, sugar, karo. I had to peel 11 oz. of whole almonds, rough cut them, then put them in a non-exsistent food processor.

So let me tell all of you what I did next. Last year, my mother broke my first blender, so I got a second one. Yesterday as I go to use it in place of a food processor, I find that the top no longer fits onto the bottom. So what I had to do was hold the top down with one hand, and press the pulse button with another. After I mixed the ground almonds with powdered sugar, I waited until the sugar syrup reached soft ball and then it hit me: I don't have three hands. So I had to go upstairs and ask my grandmother to come help me. She slowly poured in the syrup while I held and turned on the blender. Eventually, this made almond paste and that helped me make marzipan. Anyway, four hours later it was dyed, molded, rolled out, and put onto the cake. (It was the same recipe as the vanilla cake.)

Side note: So before the cake, singing, and presents, we ordered Pizza from Papa John's. While I was eating my favorite pizza (onion and green pepper on flatbread), I noticed there was a strange seasoning packet in the box instead of garlic sauce. I was kinda disappointed that the best part was missing out of the box, but I was curious to see what this "mystery packet" was. 5 minutes later, I discovered it was gross. It tasted like crunchy, peppery old bay, and it reminded me of when I was 11 and I poured tons of "Mrs. Dash" on my noodles.

Blahhhh, I just had to post something because I've been a little non-posty recently. I should have something else up tomorrow, so until then, enjoy the picture of pizza. More tomorrow ._.