My favorite food in this world has got to be cake, especially a good birthday cake, iced with thick, swirly buttercream and decorated with fancy, frothy dangerously colored fru-fru. And don’t talk to me about, “Oh, thank goodness, it wasn’t too sweet.” I want that full of confectioner’s sugar, feel-it-rot-your -teeth-sweet frosting. Yum!
I’d like to learn to decorate cakes, too, so much so that a couple of years back, I set out to collect all the Wilton Yearbooks from as far back as they were published. Of course, it starves me to death to look at them, and I usually head out for the Lowe’s Foods Bakery/Deli, the one over at Winkler Mill Road that has the lady that does beautiful work and piles that icing high, high, high! I’d buy one of those little “cakes for four” and eat a good 7/8ths of it myself.
I had to stop that because together with watching every cake special on the food network, I put on a great deal of weight. I resorted to keeping a container of Betty Crocker Frosting in the fridge and just grabbing a couple of spoonfuls during a cake wars commercial.
Lucky for me, I’m just not good at cake decorating. I get nervous, and my hands get all warm and sweaty and it melts the frosting and makes it too runny. I don’t like spooning the icing into those bags either. I wind up with multi-colored sleeves. Otherwise, I’d be broader than I am tall, and probably suffer from adult onset type 2 diabetes.
I do, however, appreciate a cake that looks and tastes good:
My daughter ordered this one from Elizabethan Delights (Charlotte, NC.)
She very wisely requested a small “smash cake” for PJ. This is what he did to it:
