Crack! It's what's for dessert or "Oh, Crap!"

When I heard that we were putting together a surprise birthday party for Johnny Schenks for his 40th I was all in.  I declared that I would make the cakes.  After much thought, questioning and consideration I decided to make a white cake, a carrot cake and a chocolate cake.  (Stand in awe of my creativity!)  OK, I admit it, they were some very safe choices, but in my own defense I have some fantastic recipes for some very basic cakes...and let's face it, the classics (which are classic for a reason) are so poorly done these days by the mass producers of baked goods that a really good classic is almost like coming home.  Come on, if it isn't angel food cake then it shouldn't be light and airy, it should be dense and moist...  I labor on, but you get my point.

I'm still enumployed so I spent Wednesday fetching everything I needed for a major bake-off on Thursday.  On Thursday I made my cakes...  they were all perfect.  Once they were cooled through to the core, I wrapped them up and stored them away in a cooler that we got a few years ago.  The cooler is big enough to bury a Jr Hi kid in and was just the right place for the cakes (someone bought a side by side fridge that isn't big enough to put a turkey in).  The cakes were safe and sound in the cooler.

Friday came and I began the ordeal of decorating.  I started with the dark chocolate ganache because it takes over an hour to set-up (if it sets up too quickly it's to hard to frost a cake with and has to be eaten with soup spoons - this isn't a bad thing, but I didn't have the ingredients for two batches).  Then the cream-cheese icing, into which I put crystalized ginger chunks (a nice addition but to be honest the punch of the ginger was not strong enough to compensate for the fact that it looked like there were boogers in the icing).

Cricket was running errands so I asked for a box to put the white cake in and a board to carry it on.  I got just what I had asked for, but it wasn't until I put the cake on the board that I realized it just didn't rise high enough to slice and add a layer of lemon curd (which I was already in the process of making).  I had borrowed Louie's half sheet layer cake pan and used a double batch of white cake to fill it...  So, I made another double batch of white cake to create my second layer.

I made the dam of icing around the edge of the bottom layer filled the dam with lemon curd and then stared at it trying to figure how on earth I was going to plop the second layer on top without causing the lemon to squirt out the sides...  In Classic Cricket style the response was simply, "Gee, I don't know..."and I promptly found myself alone in the room.  What to do???

Now, on a separate occasion my mom had suggested that I cut a cake in half to facilitate the ease of moving and manipulating it once it was iced no one would be the wiser.  I thought this was a terrible idea, because it seemed to me that the cake would pull apart when it was moved, but now that I had all this cake to work with it seemed like a great idea.  I cut the cake into two pieces, managed to find a way to lay them in the appropriate spots on the filling without it gushing out and pulled the icing from the fridge where it had gotten as hard as a rock.

I'm a stickler about icing so I'd used a block of butter and almost five pounds of powdered sugar to make a vat of butter cream (I have an easy recipe that never fails me and tastes pretty good) [sometime I'll tell you about the time Linus, who knew I was bringing to a party a batch of cupcakes with my white icing, made a white cake himself with his own white icing just to see whose icing would win in a taste competition]  So, I had two Gladware containers full of icing that I had to get to the right temp to be spreadable on a freshly baked, mostly cooled cake.

I iced it.  It was good.

I piped a turquoise border around the cake.  It was pretty.

I wrote out the lettering with a meat thermometer and then piped it in.  It was nice.

I took the bottom out of a styrofoam cup and used the cup as a funnel/stencil for small circles of colored sanding sugar on the top of the cake.  It was finished.

Of the completed cake Cricket said, "it's gorgeous..." , and it was.

We loaded the chocolate and carrot cakes into Cricket's SUV,  I packed up a triage kit in case I need to re-pipe some of the stars around the egde of the big cake, and I climbed into the car holding the cake, on a board, in its box, on my lap...

...and I'm in Jersey...

...and the pot holes are monstrous...

and as we drove I watched the cake.  Sometimes resting it on my lap, sometimes serving as a shock absorber, I carried this thing...

..and I watched it happen, just like I would have guessed that it would happen.  First the icing appeared to have been stretched on the far side of the cake, then it split and the gap began to open.  the blue stars on the far side of the cake began to sink into the crack.  "Birthday" became "B    irthday".

"CRAP!"

Cricket looks over.

"I can't believe it..."

Cricket looks over.

"Surprise, for your birthday you get an all expense trip to the Grand Canyon."

Cricket laughs.  "Can't you fix it?"

I began to wonder why, if Cricket was so blind, I was not the one who was driving. "NO!"

"Well, it will still taste delicious."

"Great!  Close your eyes and blow out your candles and keep em closed until I have a chance to cut this mess into squares."

I had worked the entire day on something that would "still taste good".  Oh, Yea! for me...

We got there as the continental divide happened on Pangea.

I brought the cake to the kitchen in the basement and stared at it.  Louie responded to my distress text and said I should just fill the crack in with icing...  I said that I couldn't fill the grand canyon with one truckload of dirt... 

I came up with a Plan B and decided that I wouldn't stress, but enjoy the party.

As we stood in line for the dinner buffet Wgeoff bent over (he's 6'8) and said to me, "Did you see the cake down stairs?  What a mess!  they spent all that money on a cake when they could have had you make one that would probably have tasted better; even if it wasn't decorated as nice."

Call me crazy, but this was one of the highest compliments of the night; he had mistaken my cake for a professional cake gone wrong!  I couldn't have been happier...

When it was all said and done I piped a big "40" on the carrot cake and called it "decorated" - thats' where the candles went and it was lovely...

...and Cricket was right, even with a crack right down the middle, the white cake filled with lemon curd and frosted with white lemon butter cream icing was still delicious.

-silly

Tweet Season on my Mind or "Polly's ghost wants a cracker"

Cricket and I are prone to collecting.  I've mentioned before that I have a love for Royal Doulton character jugs and for Wally birds...  for the most part these are pieces I've picked up here and there and on-line, at one point I pretty much depleted my life-savings on Ebay.  (I assure you that it never was a lot of money)... it's been a fun hobby...

Cricket on the other hand has been collecting bird cages.

Now, for those of you that don't know, there is a substantial difference between the size of a bird cage and that of a character jug.  Most of the cages stand taller than I do and, while they are lovely, take up a fair amount of space.  

"Why is the china cabinet out on the porch?"

"Oh, I got a new bird cage."

"Umm, the fridge is on the front lawn..."

"Oh, I got a new bird cage."

"Where's the piano?"

"Oh, I got a new bird cage."

It works like this because we keep our addictions private... When a small box shows up, I check that it's mine and off I go to a private place where I can open it and check the item.  Once I've determined that it's what I ordered, I find a place for it in "the cabinets".  (The cabinets are two 9', floor to ceiling, shelving units that house my collection)...  I've been unemployed so the collection has been relatively stagnant these past few months...

Of course, when a bird cage shows up it is a different story altogether.  These things have stands and bases and are simply enormous...  Several have shown up and had to be lowered into the house by crane.

But a week or so ago a small box showed up... just the right size for a toby.  It wasn't addressed to me; I didn't open it.  (I hoped that it was a present for my birthday or something)

Two days later, as I'm pouring a cup of coffee, I see it; a cookie jar shaped like a simple bird cage with parakeets...  it's pretty...

"Oh, this is what was in that box that came..."

"Yeah, it's a cookie jar."

"I see that.  Does this mean I have to make some cookies?"

"If you want to," lifting the cookie jar.

twist

twist

twist

"It's also a music box."

...the music plays...

...and the music is, well... it's creepy.

I agree that a good many music boxes are creepy.  As they age it only gets worse; the music plays slower and slower.  I had one that my grandparents gave me that played the "Little Drummer Boy"; in reality it played the first phrase of "Little Drummer Boy".  You know:

"Come, they told me, Pah Rum Pah Pum Pum" over and over...and over.  

When you're a child you don't long for the resolution of the whole song, so, the one phrase doesn't drive you up the wall.  I would wind it up and let it play and play and play and play.  I enjoyed it so much that Mom decided that it should be put away with all the other "Christmas stuff"...  years later I found it buried in the linen cabinet...

Bean once bought my little sis a Christmas nutcracker that played (of all things) "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes".  Like I say, "There are some things that should never be made; there some things that are made that should never be bought; those things that should never have been made and never have been bought should never, ever, be given to your wife for Christmas."

Enough deeply nested tangent...

I expected the bird cage cookie jar to play any of various tunes that music boxes play such as "The Happy Wanderer", "Over the Rainbow", "Feed the Birds" even...  but not a funeral march...  the slow plinking music in a minor key is haunting and disturbing.  

If Uncle Fester from the Addams Family had an ice cream truck... 

If all the children in "Oliver Twist" went back to the work house at the end of the movie...

If Tim Burton were to recreate the Sound of Music in claymation...

...this is what the music would sound like...

...and so, there it sits on the counter; the haunted cookie jar.  It is old, old, old and remembers all the times it's been wound in the past and plays a stray note just when you've recovered from the last time it played.

My guess is that when the cookie jar is filled the weight of the cookies keeps the music from playing.  As each cookie is taken from the jar the weight decreases until it is light enough for the funeral march to start playing...  

The more I thought about this, the more it made sense to me.

I'm having a music box installed on the fridge door later in the week...  I should be ready for my swimsuit in no time...

-silly

Orchids and the cracked pot

Well, Cricket sent me flowers and they are gorgeous. I brought in one of my cracked pots to put them in. I'm going to do a bunch of these in Raku - I hope they're as successful as the stomeware piece pictured. I need to get a better shot of this, but wanted to post it before the flowers faded...

Raku with the boys

Here's a fun pic of me with Cricket and Wolf... It was from the Raku class back in Feb at Ceramic Supply in Lodi... yeah!!!

-silly

RAKU-Feb 08

So Cricket and Wolf and I took another Raku class over the weekend. What fun!!! This time at Ceramic Supply in (Lodi?)... I have to tell you, I just love doing raku... maybe it's the instant gratification, or the crap-shoot of how things will come out of the kiln, but it is really an exciting process.

It was a whole different group of people, but what a fun selection of different types of work. It is always funny to me to find how much potters have in common when we get together for a workshop. Plenty of odd people to be sure, but some really great folks overall.

Well, here are a few of the new pieces. Oddly enough the green one and the brassy one are the same glaze.

-silly