Icing of good things, not bad
Nov. 24th, 2008 11:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
j4Today saw another cake added to the growing portfolio. It's handy when someone learns a whole new skill just in time for a perfect cake-related pun, it wasn't too difficult to make (though it was mildly difficult to get it into work safely and secretly) and the result went down well (by which I mean everybody went "ooh" and then ate it).
I still haven't sorted out all my cake photos on my website or on flickr; not just the cakes I've decorated, but also the inspirations behind them, the cakes my mum made for me and my sister when we were growing up. It's a growing corpus of cake and every time I do another one it adds to the weight of expectations, the feeling that the next one is guaranteed to be a let-down. It seems ironic to document them when half of the reason I enjoy making them is that it's a gift that people don't have to keep forever; but to be honest, I think I'd feel even more pressured by my own past productions if I didn't have documentary evidence that actually they weren't perfect, the corners weren't that neat, the writing wasn't that straight. (None of them were Cake Wrecks by any means, but they were a long way from those incredible Russian cakes that have been doing the rounds on the internet for a while now.) For years, without having a photo to refer to, I remembered the Sonic the Hedgehog cake (the first time we did a traced-on-icing cartoon) as being pretty much perfect, the colours being as vibrant as the computer game ... and, yes, it's pretty good, but it's not perfect.
Despite all my worries about each cake having to be better than the last, I'm planning to make my own wedding cake. It's not going to look like an explosion in a flower-shop or some kind of horrific meringue-related incident; it's going to be in the same style as all the other cakes I make: flat and excessively decorated. I've done bigger cakes and more elaborate cakes for other occasions than what I'm planning, so I don't think I'm being too ambitious. (The really ambitious cake I want to do one day is a 9-tiered cake representing Dante's nine levels of hell, with the damned falling off the edges all over the place like something from Hieronymous Bosch... but for some reason![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
addedentry though that wouldn't be quite the thing for a wedding.) Today's cake somehow wasn't actually as tasty as usual, though — or maybe it's just that I'm feeling tired and ill and nothing seems to taste of anything much any more — so maybe I should delegate the cake-making to someone else. If, that is, I can find anybody who'll make me a 12-inch-square cake with just white icing, no flowers or bows or piped scalloped edges or any bloody decoration at all, for a reasonable price. Maybe I'm just being silly and I should just accept that a wedding cake is a thing that looks like everybody else's wedding cake and costs as much as a MacBook; having said that, though, it's probably too late to change my mind now because you probably have to give several years' notice for ordering wedding cakes. Hey ho. At the end of the day, it's only a cake.
I still haven't sorted out all my cake photos on my website or on flickr; not just the cakes I've decorated, but also the inspirations behind them, the cakes my mum made for me and my sister when we were growing up. It's a growing corpus of cake and every time I do another one it adds to the weight of expectations, the feeling that the next one is guaranteed to be a let-down. It seems ironic to document them when half of the reason I enjoy making them is that it's a gift that people don't have to keep forever; but to be honest, I think I'd feel even more pressured by my own past productions if I didn't have documentary evidence that actually they weren't perfect, the corners weren't that neat, the writing wasn't that straight. (None of them were Cake Wrecks by any means, but they were a long way from those incredible Russian cakes that have been doing the rounds on the internet for a while now.) For years, without having a photo to refer to, I remembered the Sonic the Hedgehog cake (the first time we did a traced-on-icing cartoon) as being pretty much perfect, the colours being as vibrant as the computer game ... and, yes, it's pretty good, but it's not perfect.
Despite all my worries about each cake having to be better than the last, I'm planning to make my own wedding cake. It's not going to look like an explosion in a flower-shop or some kind of horrific meringue-related incident; it's going to be in the same style as all the other cakes I make: flat and excessively decorated. I've done bigger cakes and more elaborate cakes for other occasions than what I'm planning, so I don't think I'm being too ambitious. (The really ambitious cake I want to do one day is a 9-tiered cake representing Dante's nine levels of hell, with the damned falling off the edges all over the place like something from Hieronymous Bosch... but for some reason
addedentry though that wouldn't be quite the thing for a wedding.) Today's cake somehow wasn't actually as tasty as usual, though — or maybe it's just that I'm feeling tired and ill and nothing seems to taste of anything much any more — so maybe I should delegate the cake-making to someone else. If, that is, I can find anybody who'll make me a 12-inch-square cake with just white icing, no flowers or bows or piped scalloped edges or any bloody decoration at all, for a reasonable price. Maybe I'm just being silly and I should just accept that a wedding cake is a thing that looks like everybody else's wedding cake and costs as much as a MacBook; having said that, though, it's probably too late to change my mind now because you probably have to give several years' notice for ordering wedding cakes. Hey ho. At the end of the day, it's only a cake.
