Patriotic baking, pt. 2

A particular somebody turned 30 this summer, and a surprise party was in the works. Brainstorming with my friend Rachel, 30 seemed to be suspiciously boring in terms of coming of age (e.g., joining the army, legally drinking, or, I don't know, cheaper rental cars). That is, until Rachel said, "Well, at 30, you're eligible to run for senate." Seeing as how the birthday boy is a huge political wonk, it seemed like a good idea to make a Senate Cake.

That I was making a cake was not a surprise, but the fact that I was throwing a party was. And, the cake was way more of a pain in my butt than I had imagined. First, watching a whole bunch of Ace of Cakes episodes right before the Surprise Day was not a good idea. I got it in my head to make a "FABULOUS, OFF-THE-HOOK" cake. Then I realized that I don't know how to make such types of cakes, and found myself in quite a bind.

Finally, I realized I could just make a decent, yummy cake but just decorate it all crazy. I made a chocolate layer cake, probably from "How to Cook Everything," filled it with fresh whipped cream with some fresh raspberries into it, and covered it with fondant to decorate. I also used duck eggs for the baking since we had some from the farmer's market, and they're a bit richer than chicken eggs.

So, fondant. Hmm. Fondant is rolled out sugar that's used to cover fancy cakes for fancy events, to allow for fancy decorating. A few days before the party, I began asking myself, how does one acquire fondant? A quick internet search revealed that you can actually get some pre-made fondant from Michael's, but I wasn't sure how much I'd need, nor did I want to stick to the pre-determined colors from the store. Some online recipes seemed extraordinarily complex, calling for too many ingredients than I wanted to deal with. Then, the next day we were in the neighborhood of a Whole Foods, so I went in to ask about it. Several clueless employees later, I found myself talking with the pastry chef, who gave me a basic recipe that, apparently, is all over the internet if you just know to ask for marshmallow fondant. The deal is that fondant involves gelatin, but instead of making it from scratch you can just use marshmallows, which include gelatin anyway. Off we go!

(Note that the link to marshmallow fondant shows very tidy, very neat, very delicious looking steps to making fondant. This was not the case for me, because I wasn't following any instructions; just going off of what the baker had told me.)

I melted a batch of vanilla marshmallows in a saucepan with some butter and almost an entire box of powdered sugar. This stuff got really gooey really quickly, got all over my hands, and when it came to rolling out on the counter, got powdered sugar all over the kitchen. All. Over. But, eventually it got hard enough to form into shapes/roll into a ball, which meant success! You can store fondant in tightly wrapped plastic wrap, which is what I did while I baked a cake.

Unfortunately my fondant was kind of an ugly color, not the pretty white you see all the time, but more like an off-white almost gray. Fortunately, I had bought a bunch of food dyes and cake decorating things from the grocery store to match a US Senate Seal I had printed off the internet.

WOW. If I thought rolling out the fondant was hard, adding color was a whole other story. Drops of food coloring went into the fondant, then kneaded in for equal distribution. My fondant was tougher than I expected, and my bad back didn't make kneading easy. It would have loved a royal blue color for the cake, but I got lazy and stopped once I got past a pastel, robin's egg blue. I also made fondant in green and and red for other pieces of the decoration.

Roll out the fondant, way bigger than you think you need, and cover your cake with it. To make it stick to the cake better, I whipped up a basic Mocha buttercream (melted chocolate stirred into butter, more powdered sugar, a pinch of salt, and instant coffee, thinned with milk) and spread a thin layer over the cake.

Next came the decorations, which was probably the most fun part. I'd go into detail, but you can just see it here:

Not bad for a first-time experience with fondant and/or cake decorating, and the cake itself turned out to be pretty good, too. The whipped cream and raspberries were a really nice filler for the cake, and the mocha buttercream added a nice espresso hint of flavor. (The cake was a little dry/crumbly for my tastes -- still getting used to the new oven.) A fabulous surprise party, with a fun cake, and many more birthday celebrations to come!