The End is Here

So, my birthday was last week. For my birthday my brother bought me a Battered Hilt for Meyr off the AH. So, now I'm very excited that I can get an awesome weapon for my hunter. Now, I'm off to bake some cupcakes and play some DnD. Somebody make sure that I don't run into any doors this time.

Today being the last day of April is the last day of BEDApril 2010. And I'm very proud to say that I made it!! I was able to post as a post everyday, for 30 days.

The End.

Concussion Cupcakes

Its everybody's favorite joke:

"Meyr walks into a door.... ouch"

Anyone knowing me by any degree has probably heard this story to some extent. So, I bring you know by semi-popular demand: the whole story.

After graduating from High School my group of friends all pretty much chose colleges up and down the state of California, well everyone except my best friend Emma, she decided she wanted to go to school in New York-- and so she did. Over the summer before she left she had a Going Away Party. Since we both share a passion for decorating cupcakes-- she was the one that thought of and organized the decorating of 110 cupcakes to make a periodic table for my birthday (although she still has yet to email me the other pictures from that).

So, of course I volunteered (insisted) that I make her cupcakes. And so I did. She was having her party on Sunday so throughout the week I planned the design and I made sure I had everything I needed. On Friday I was going to do the baking and the basic frosting and Saturday the decorating.

It's Friday afternoon, I clean the kitchen up and start getting all my supplies ready. Hmm... I need ziplock bags. So I went to the laundry room where we have some shelving for spare things like ketchup, peanut butter, and ziplock bags. While I can't really remember why I needed them now, I grabbed several extra and while passing my bedroom  I stepped in the doorway to set several down on the foot of my bed. I turn and continue walking on my way to the Kitchen.

BAM! Doorframe. 

My whole head rattled with the impact. I staggered back and walked to the kitchen set the ziplock bags on the kitchen counter. At this point my brother hearing me walk into a door is wondering what happened. I explain to him that I must not have turned enough and walked straight into the door frame and hit my head and something about being glad about not breaking my glasses, in-between sobs. Let me tell you it was quite painful because unlike walking into the swinging door, the doorframe doesn't lose energy to that whole swinging thing-- it just hits you with all of that energy. So, at this point I'm sitting down, crying, laughing, hoping the pain will go away soon. My brother is quick to the computer to search for signs and sympthoms of a concussion and he continued to look after me and over me the rest of the weekend. After 20 minutes the pain subsides. And I actually manage to do the baking. However, now with a concussion, I had headaches, loss of focus, nausea, trouble sleeping and dizziness at different points throughout the weekend and a mean bruise that for once my inability to turn colors was a good thing. The cupcakes themselves also kept having difficulties throughout the rest of the weekend, like melting white chocolate letters, piping bag troubles and the fact that I wasn't able to stay for the actually party (I had to drop off the cupcakes and leave) because I was so nauseous. And pictures of the cupcakes... I have all of 3 because my memory card in my camera was corrupted. Its like they didn't want Emma to leave either.

Part Three: The Conclusion

Yesterday I continued the  "Multipart Posting Spectacular. So today I bring you the conclusion to the series. 


I suppose I got a little ahead of myself yesterday (Don't worry, the cake is not lie... I just have some backtracking to do first). Before I was able to frost and decorate the cakes I still had to remove them from the pans and stack  them together. The first cake came out cleaning while the second (shown here on top) had a portion of the bottom stuck in the pan. In order to make a  single cake out of the two  I had to do two things. First I had to carve a flat surface to join the two  and join them together with a layer of frosting. And second I carved around the edges to make a smoother more continuos surface to frost. It was fairly simple I grabbed a serrated knife (in this case its actually a steak knife but it worked wonderfully) and set about cutting and sawing. I worked on a plate so that I could easily lift and flip the cake onto the serving plate. This also gave me an opportunity to taste the cake from the scraps. 

So now that we're all caught up-- the finished cake. 

And thus concludes the  "Multipart Posting Spectacular.  I hope you all enjoyed it.

Part Two: Baking and Frosting

In yesterday's post I began a special series I dubbed the "Multipart Posting Spectacular." So here is today's continuation. 


For David's cake I decided to bake a "yellow cake" mix-- partially because he likes vanilla flavored cakes and partially because it was the only type of cake mix I had. At some point I'd like to try making my own cake's from scratch, but for now the boxed mixes are convenient and rather tasty. So I gathered my supplies started to work while the oven preheated.

I whipped up the cake and poured the batter into the pans.

Then they hit the oven. I set a timer and approximately 30 minutes later I pulled the cakes out.

 

While I did not make a cake from scratch in favor a boxed mix, I did make my own frosting. And I must say that I learned quite a bit in the process.

I used a recipe that called for:

     1 cup shortening

     2 teaspoons vanilla
     4 cups powdered sugar
     4 tablespoons milk

From that I upped everything but the shortening, for taste and texture. 

As I began to color the frosting I realized two things: 

1.) I didn't have enough food color to make red frosting (so it turned out pink and actually a little darker than the first picture).

2.) food coloring is water-based and doesn't mix well with the oil based shortening (as a solution this recipe would need some sort of emulsifier (eggs for example) so that the two would combine better).

After mixing the frosting a lovely shade of pink I spread it over the entire cake and mixed the remainder into a darker color that was trying to black but ended up a grayish-purple and put that into a piping bag. I piped the words and a border on to the cake and "attached the characters."

Thank you for reading Part Two. Tomorrow in the conclusion, I'll reveal the finished cake. Stay tuned. 

Part One: Cake Design

Sorry for the delay in in posts and the somewhat secrecy (I couldn't have my surprise cake design ruined). Without further ado, I present you a multipart posting spectacular-- featuring drama, intrigue, and frosting.  

This past weekend a good friend of mine, David, celebrated his 20th birthday. And for some reason I decided to bake a cake him (it might have so something to do with my fondness for decorating cupcakes).

Thus began my dissent into frosting.

To start I decided to stack two round 8 inch cakes to create the shape of the cake. This gave me a canvas but I still had to come up with a design. And, of course, when I offered to decorate a cake I had no idea what I wanted it to look like. Eventually I decided to feature and image of David's character from WoW, Maynar, and my character's pet cat, Cindy. Here are some of the sketches I came up with.

At first I wanted to use this cake as an experiment with fondant,  but I just didn't have time to learn a new medium. So I instead decided to make the figures on paper and attach them to the cake.

I also planned to pipe a simple message that read something to the effect of "Happy Birthday, David!" However, all this was subject to change...

Check back tomorrow for Part Two.