Birthday cake followup
I’ve gotten several questions about the cake, so I might as well tell everyone how it came out. The practice cake I made a couple of weeks before Kat’s birthday turned out tremendously well given my low expectations. Here’s how it looked:
I’d never decorated a cake before. I did find the cake was still a little fragile despite my attempts to fix this with gum, so I decided that it was just going to stay in the pan I used as a decorating surface. I probably also should have bought a spatula for the flat parts instead of using that plastic scraper that came with my food processor. I miscalculated the amounts of icing needed for the various colors and didn’t leave myself enough plain white, so most of those white stars were made with the white icing thinned with corn syrup used on the flat parts, making them a little grayer and a little shinier than they should have been. In general the icing had a bit of a shiny, oily sheen to it, since the vegetable shortening didn’t whip into crisp, stiff peaks like butter would have, but it was the right consistency and didn’t look too awful. I also found that most people aren’t too keen on the idea of vegan cake, and it’s hard to hide that feature when trying to give someone a piece of birthday cake that I apparently baked for no particular reason. I ended up eating a few pieces myself (like the missing tail in the picture) and throwing the rest out after it became stale. Oh well.
As for the real cake, something went horribly wrong with the icing. I’m not sure exactly what—maybe I messed up and used too much shortening, maybe the phase of the moon was wrong—but it came out far too thick. I couldn’t get it to squeeze out of the decorating bags, and if I squeezed too hard a big solid wad of frosting would force the tip out the bag and force a big pink wad of sweetened oil onto whatever I was trying to deliciately outline. Eventually I gave up, frosted the head flat with the green icing, made an eye with the pink, cut all of that off and gave that to Kat instead of the whole dinosaur. Oh well.