Cake Controversy - Part 3

When we last left our caped-cake crusader and his very stubborn mother-in-law, the gauntlet of cake challenge had been thrown down in the middle of my kitchen. Date of the challenge - Wednesday night., one night before Hailey's birthday on Thursday. Wednesday during the day, Grandma baked four cakes. She had great success baking the cakes, but she did "cheat" by using boxed mixes. Four cakes there were...now if only we had a design by which to decorate them. Oh wait, our caped-cake crusader to the rescue, if he ever got out of work. It was 8pm before Luke got home and began, yes began, looking for the design for the cake. One hour and 50 Google searches later, he had selected a total of 25 "possible" cake options, from designs that looked like an iPhone to ones that were full scale castles. Ok, seriously? It was now 9pm, and we still had 4 naked cakes. Finally, we all agreed to scale the cake back a bit, going with a simple square cake design with a carved 3 on the top.

Luke immediately set out to carve the 3, but wait!!!! We have no cake carving knife...what kind of a house do we live in with no cake carving knife???? How can he go on? Well, perhaps a regular knife could cut it just this one time. While the 3 was being carved, my mother and I began making icing options. Oh so many icing options. First, we made cream cheese icing for the red velvet cake, but of course the cream cheese frosting couldn't adhere the fondant. Why not, you ask? I have no Earthly idea. So, on to the buttercream frosting. Wait, this recipe calls for boiling milk. If you boil milk, doesn't it scald and taste like crap? Ok, new recipe please. Uh oh, we don't have a cake frosting utensil. Ugh...this house is so not supplied for cake decorating. Perhaps we'll have to just go with a spatula or a butter knife. Can we wrestle one of those up? Yes, chef! (Probably a mistake to watch Hells Kitchen during this process)

After the cakes were stacked, carved, and frosted, it was time for the most exciting part....rolling the fondant. Luke set about coloring the fondant pink, but only after complaining that we didn't have the proper gloves to protect his delicate fingers from the food coloring. Oh, and also, I didn't buy enough fondant. Although I'll remind you that I wasn't supposed to buy any fondant at all because the Ace of Cakes was going to make his from scratch. I only really bought it on a whim as a back up. So, really I bought too much fondant if you ask me, but I digress. Back to the fondant rolling. Well, the fondant rolling was a bit anticlimactic. It just rolled out like sticky cookie dough. Unfortunately, the first time he rolled it, it was the wrong shape for the cakes - round, not square. So, back to the rolling pin he went (oh, I forgot to mention that it was a metal rolling pin and not the long wooden ones like they have on tv. I think that's item number 65 to add to our list of things we need to buy if we ever bake another cake. Sorry Hailey, there goes your college fund). Right, back to the fondant. Rolling it a second time, which was of course my fault for not buying enough, caused the fondant to crack a bit in the corners. Luckily, the expert cake-crusader gently molded the fondant back together. Well, tried to anyway. The corners were, let's just say, a bit rough. However, by midnight we had a cake that I think we were all proud of...how it tasted, well that was to be determined Thursday and will be told in the final episode of the cake controversy.