The Barefoot Kitchen Witch

100th Day

Last week we got a notice that today Alex's kindergarten class would be celebrating "100th Day" - their 100th day of school.  There was to be a party, and would anyone be interested in making a cake.

Well.

PICK ME, PICK ME!

So I got the "job" and my brain started in on the design.  I was thinking I could somehow incorporate little images to represent all the different topics they'd covered since September...like space and the Arctic and Farm Animals and all the other weekly themes.  It would be a tour de force of a cake, I imagined.

For 18 kids.

And then I asked Alex for ideas on what it should taste like...and he said chocolate and strawberries.  (Not strawberry flavor - REAL strawberries.  He was quite specific.)  And then he said he wanted to help decorate it.

Um.  Okay.

I started trying to figure out what he could do that wouldn't interfere with my cleverly rendered images of nocturnal animals and autumn leaves.  Maybe he would be happy just to help with baking the cake.

Nope.

So yesterday we baked the two cake layers - one chocolate with chocolate chips.  One white cake with fresh (well, frozen) strawberries, sliced, and strategically placed all over the batter before it went into the oven.  Both layers smelled really good.

The strawberry layer...half of it broke when I was trying to gently slide it on top of the frosted chocolate layer.  But I patched it back together.  Still.  I admit I was getting...um...tense.

I managed to talk Alex out of helping with the frosting of the strawberry layer - it was just going to be too difficult to let him help, what with the cake all torn and patched together.  My blood pressure went up just imagining it.

So I applied a coat of white frosting to the top layer, and it looked all lumpy because of all the breaks in the cake.  So.  I put more frosting on top of that.  To make it more even.  There's logic for you.

So then I had to cover the whole thing with fondant.  Because kindergarteners will appreciate the flawlessly smooth surface...my canvas. 

Either I have become a weakling, or the fondant was stiffer than usual, or I was just cursed yesterday, but it took me A LONG TIME to roll it out thin enough and big enough to cover the cake.  I felt myself growing more and more frustrated and anguished (back of the hand to my brow - I fear I shall faint!) and plain ol' pissed off about EVERYTHING TO DO WITH THIS CAKE.  Me and my idiot ideas.  THIS WAS THE MOST STRESSFUL CAKE I HAD EVER DONE IN MY ENTIRE LIFE!!!!

When Bill got home from work I had managed to get the fondant on and trim it, and I stood there at the counter, glaring at the cake and at a sheet of paper on which I was trying to design something that Alex could help with.  Because he still wanted to.  So my elaborate artistry was out. 

I asked Bill, through clenched teeth, if he could take the kids to swim class so I could work on this...this...THING.  He shrugged and said fine, and so of course I said "Fine, never mind, I'll go too."  And he looked at me and watched my eyes spin in opposite directions and said "No, really, it's no big deal."  And I said "No, no, I'll go.  If you could just keep Julia occupied after we get back so Alex and I can do this...cake."  "Sure.  Jayne, are you okay?"

I glared at him.  What was THAT supposed to mean?????  "I'mfineIjustneedtogetthiscakedoneandit'sbeenoneofthosedayswiththem" I spat out.

Anyway.  We went to swim class, and he tried to chat with me while we watched the kids swim, but I would have none of that, because I needed PEACE AND QUIET for a few moments, WOULD YOU??? 

When it came time for the kids to jump in - it was great, truly.  Alex wanted to go first - me me me me!!!!! And when he jumped in, he leapt with everything he had and jumped far enough to reach the first line in the pool.  YAY ALEX!  And he did it a second time, too.  He will be moving up to the next level - our son will be...an EEL!  We are quite proud.  So is he.  Julia will remain a Pike - she's still too busy socializing at times to move up.  But she can move through the water pretty quickly when she wants to.  She just needs to want to more often.

Anyway, dry off the kids, come home, I threw dinner together for everyone else and then started glaring at the cake again.  And finally I came up with an idea.  Something Alex could really do. 

My grand and glorious ideas would just have to sit on a shelf.  After all, it was HIS 100th day, not mine.

And here's what the cake looks like:

I painted swirls on the fondant with water, and had Alex sprinkle colored sugars all over.  They stick to the wet surface, and we blew them off the rest of the cake.  It's colorful and festive, I think. 

Most importantly, Alex thinks it's wonderful. 

He can't wait to bring it to school this morning.

And that, really, is the point, after all.  Not my showing off.  Duh.

So now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go get dressed and cover the cake with plastic wrap.

Because, of course, it is raining this morning. 

Figures.

Happy 100th day, Alex!

Cakes - Patriots Cake - 1997

I've been trying to keep Wednesdays as "Cake Day" but it seems appropriate to post this one today.

A coworker (back in 97) asked me to make a birthday cake for her husband, who was, clearly, a huge Patriots fan.  The cake was chocolate, and the frosting was made with peanutbutter.  I used royal icing for the "artwork." 

I have a little note to myself on the index card that accompanies this picture:  "Note to me...peanutbutter frosting has to be refrigerated - it is heavy - pulls cake while being applied and droops.  Fine between layers, but not very aesthetically pleasing on outer layer."

Here it is:

Cakes - Spider Cake #1 - 1996

This one was for a couple of coworkers who share a Halloween birthday.  I wanted to do something in keeping with the spooky them of the holiday, and this is what I came up with.

I could have done a better job of displaying the spiders, I think...but so many of these cakes were just experiments - I made everything up as I went along.

Okay - well, part of the deal in making cakes for people at work was that I needed to have enough cake for everyone.  So to solve that issue, the base is a 13 x 9 inch chocolate cake that I covered with fondant.  I tinted it green.  Why green?  Well, it's not JUST green, it's "Juniper Green."  So I'm thinking I recently bought some new food coloring shades and I wanted to play with them.  Actually, considering that the two loaf-pan shaped layers on top of this first layer were tinted with "Aster Mauve" and "Delphinium Blue" confirms it.  Hahaha.  No other reason for the colors at all except that they were new.

The other new toy I must have purchased right around this time was a piping tip that had lots of tiny holes in it and could be used to make grass or fur with your icing.  So that's how I did the spider bodies.  I made two chocolate cupcakes.  I wrapped them in brown fondant.  I made little fondant spider heads.  And I piped brown frosting through that tip to give my spiders furry bodies.  The legs were the only inedible parts - I used big brown pipe cleaners. 

And the other decorating was Charlotte-inspired - I piped spider webs on the loaf-pan layers and the green layer, and in the webs I did the "Happy Birthday" thing for each of the two people. 

I will tell you that when I was making this cake, I'd made my spiders, and had positioned them on the cake, which was on a work stand in my little apartment kitchen.  And every so often I would catch one of them looking at me....it was a little creepy until I got used to them.

And here they are:

Kind of cute, aren't they?

Cakes: Coffee Cup Cake - Meredith's Birthday - 1996

This is one of my favorite cake creations of all time.  Well, all of MY time, anyway.

First, a little background....

I used to go down to my sister's house on the weekends a lot back around this time.   Early in the morning, or sometimes overnight.  We'd have coffee in the mornings.  Natalie was a baby, Calvin was a round-cheeked toddler...and a terrific new bagel place had opened up in town, and they also had flavored coffees.  Sometimes I'd bring Calvin with me to pick out the bagles and coffee for the morning. 

Anyway - as I said, Natalie was a baby, and she didn't go to bed cooperatively or sleep through the night...so coffee was verrrrrrrrry important as early in the morning as possible. 

That's one thing.  The other is, and I think I've already mentioned this in one (or both) of the other posts about cakes I've done for my sister, the cake needs to be CHOCOLATE. 

Okay.  Now ALSO, around this time period, or maybe the year before, I'd bought a book that included all sorts of cool Christmas-themed ideas - not just decorating, but baking, cooking, gift-giving, whatever.  And in there - the sole reason I bought the book - was a recipe about making bowls out of very firm gingerbread.  And I thought those were really cool.  I know I made bowls one year, as part of the cookie-giving thing...not sure which year.

So that's the background.

And so when I was thinking about some sort of theme for my sister's cake, I thought about coffee.  And came up with the idea of making a giant coffee cup out of gingerbread, and filling it with cake.

So here's the very short version of a several-day process:

First I made the gingerbread coffee mug.  I made the gingerbread dough (the same dough used for these gingerbread houses) according to the directions and formed the mug shape over a stainless steel mixing bowl, baked it, and also made a handle and a saucer. 

I used royal icing to glue the handle to the cup, and then I used thinned royal icing, tinted light blue, to paint the cup and saucer.  I used a darker blue icing for the splatter design on them, which was fun - just tipped the brush in it and shook or drizzled the darker blue onto the lighter blue. 

For the cake, I baked probably four 8" layers of chocolate cake.  Then I lined the same stainless steel mixing bowl with plastic wrap.  I cut the layers of cake to fit in the bowl, and in between them I layered a mixture of raspberry jam and chocolate frosting.  Once I had all the layers set up, I just (carefully) pulled the whole thing out of the bowl - the cake layers cradled in the plastic wrap - and set it down into the coffee cup.  I used the plastic wrap (rather than just assembling the cake inside the cup) to keep the moisture of the cake from seeping into the gingerbread and turning the whole thing into a blue soggy mess.

Next, I melted some chocolate and made a circle on a piece of parchment and let it set.  Then I drizzled melted white chocolate in a swirl on top, to represent the half & half she takes in her coffee.  When that was all dry and firm, I set that on top of the cake.  And that was that.

I especially like how my nephew has his fork all ready.  "Come on, Mommy, stop staring at it and cut me a piece!"

Actually, I think to serve it we removed the disc of chocolate on top and then pulled out the whole chocolate cake thing in the plastic wrap, and just cut that up.  She kept the cup for quite a while, until the icing "paint" started to flake off.

(And, of course, I'm noticing that I committed one of the cardinal sins of photography - there is a lamp growing out of my nephew's head.  Hahahahahahaha.  Ah, well.) 

 

Cakes - M & M Birthday Cake - 1996

I sat near a girl at work who loved M&Ms.  So, just for fun, I made her this birthday cake.

It's 2 8" rounds of chocolate cake and one 12" round.  Layered - 8-12-8 with chocolate frosting between the layers.  Then I carved it into the shape of an M&M candy, covered that with frosting, and then wrapped the whole thing in fondant that I'd tinted green.  Then I iced the "m" on the top with royal icing and surrounded the whole thing with mini M&Ms.

Cakes - Dad's Birthday - 1996

One of my first baking assistants was my sister's son, Calvin.  He was three when he helped me make this cake for my father for his birthday.  The cake was probably carrot cake or spice cake, and it was covered with a cream cheese frosting.

I made stencils of the tracings of Calvin's hands, and we dusted the hand patterns with cocoa powder.  The rest of the decorating was done with green colored frosting. 

Not much else to tell about this one.  I'm pretty sure it tasted good.

Cakes - "Who's the Genius?" - 1996 (I think)

This one has a little story.

This is the slightly shortened version.

My cousin, Steve, had gone to Chicago on business.  While he was out there, he had shopped at a Warner Brothers gift store and brought home a black plastic "bomb" with a fuse coming out of the top - like in the cartoons.  There was writing around the top of the black ball - "Who's the Genius?"  And inside, Steve told me, was a tee shirt.  Cool packaging. 

And it was empty.  Steve was stunned (and annoyed at spending money on an empty plastic ball), and I thought it was incredibly funny. 

Now...to add some background - Steve and I are the same age - I'm a month older - and we've known each other since we were twelve.  We've always had a friendly sort of rivalry in terms of who's smarter - I'm probably the crueler of the two of us.  He's much better natured. 

So - the empty plastic container struck me funny on a few levels.

And so, when it was time to make his birthday cake, I had the perfect subject matter.

I don't even remember what kind of cake was inside.  Probably chocolate.  I do, however, remember grinning like a fool the whole time I was making this, the whole time I was icing it in black, and writing "Who's the Genius?" around the top. 

And honestly?  He's much smarter than I am.  But don't tell him I said that. 

Cakes - Natalie's First Birthday - 1996

I have no notes on this one, and I'm thinking it might not even be chronologically correct in my little photo album of cakes...but oh well. 

We skip ahead a few years to my niece's first birthday.  I used a Wilton teddy bear pan that we must have borrowed from someone because I don't have it here.  I think it may have been borrowed from Beth...Beth?  That sound right?  Mere, do you remember?

Anyway, the cake pan came with pictures of suggested decorating themes...I think you could decorate the bear as a cheerleader, or, as in this case, a ballerina.  I don't remember the other choices.  My sister went with the pinkest, girliest one because, well, she had a girl!

Somewhere I have pictures of Natalie - bald little Natalie - with pink frosting on her face and her mouth and eyes wide open in surprise or delight or a sugar rush.  Very cute. 

I think the cake was chocolate...if my sister was choosing the flavor, then it was definitely chocolate.

Gee, this is a really exciting and informative post, isn't it?

That could be because I had some sort of snobby aversion to the cake pan - not just this one but any character cake pan.  I don't know - I get weird like that at times.

But anyway - there you go.  I'm looking ahead at the next couple of pictures, and one of them is DEFINITELY way out of order here.  Oh well.  I will just follow along anyway.  Even though it will bother me.  I'm so easily bothered....

Cakes - Jack O' Lantern Cake - 1992

This was the first, um...representational cake that I can remember making.  It's the first one I photographed, anyway.  It was for my sister's birthday, and I remember feeling rather clever as I put this together.  It's 4 layers of chocolate cake (always chocolate when it's Mere's birthday) with chocolate frosting in between.

I particularly remember how important it was to me that I achieve the CORRECT shade of orange to match the pumpkin I was copying.  I only had one of those little 4-packs of liquid food coloring, and I think I probably added red and yellow a drip at a time, stirring thoroughly after each addition before deciding what it needed more of.

The stem is an actual pumpkin stem - I think it fell off a pumpkin that I was picking up.  I know I soaked it in hot water for a while, maybe with a dash of bleach in there to kill any little germs or bugs hanging around.

It's a jack o'lantern on one side, and on the back it says "Happy Birthday Meredith."  I piped the black on top of the orange...but if I were to do it again, I would probably cover the cake with fondant instead of frosting...and I'd actually cut out the eyes and nose and mouth so there would be that 3-dimensional element that's lacking in this one.  I think I remember scooping frosting off the face of the pumpkin when I did this one.  I'd try to make the bottom of the pumpkin more rounded and realistic too.    

But still...not a bad start to my little hobby.

More Cake Stuff for a Moment

I've added a badge to one of my flickr sets over there on the right, under the "Gallery of Cakes" category.  I figured I'd just go one cake at a time in here and describe what I did when I made them.  I still have a ton more pictures to upload, but I figure I'll add more after I've talked about the ones that are there now.

I'll be back....

Cakes - Lemon Sponge Pizza Cake 2007

Okay, well the third of the 3 birthday cakes I did last week was actually a pie.  A Lemon Sponge Pie - actually a triple version of it.  I used puff pastry dough as the crust, but that really wasn't necessary - I'm still not exactly sure why I used that instead of just a regular pastry crust.  Sometimes my ideas just drag me along behind them and I don't ask questions.

The story behind this one really sort of begins years ago, when I used to make a lot of birthday cakes for the people at work.  Our dept manager actually paid me to do this for everyone, which was nice - nice of him and nice for me.  So I these cakes for a few years until someone (as I understand it) from some other department complained (why?  nothing better to do?  no cake for you?) and that ended the fun.

Anyway, D. had been the recipient of, I believe, 3 of my cakes over the years, and so, since I'm leaving soon and feeling kind of nostalgic, I offered to make a cake.

Why pizza?  D. had indicated that instead of the usual bagels and cream cheese, or store-boughten cakes that have been provided to birthday folk recently, he'd rather have pizza.  Or lasagne.  So another girl in the dept decided to make lasagne, and I offered to make a cake that looked like a pizza, as a surprise.  And that was how it began. 

I used a large (14") cake pan for this.  Two boxes of frozen puff pastry dough.  Triple the Lemon Sponge Pie recipe.  And I forced the family to eat pizza for dinner on Halloween just so I'd have an actual pizza box to use for presentation.  (Okay, "forced" is a bit of an exaggeration.)

Anyway, here we go...

First thing I did was to line the pan with the puff pastry dough.  I had to cut and paste (so to speak) the rectangles of dough, but it didn't take long, and two boxes was the perfect amount.  I curled the edges under to create the edge of the pizza crust, and then put the pan into the fridge to keep the dough chilled.

Next - the pie filling.

Per the instructions, I combined the butter, sugar and egg yolks, lemon juice, lemon zest, milk, salt and flour, and set them aside.

In a separate bowl, I whipped the egg whites until stiff.

And then folded them into the yolk/lemon mixture...

   

...until combined.  (You want to do this as gently as possible, so as to leave as many air bubbles as possible intact.)

And then pour it into the pie shell.

And slide that into your 375 degree oven.

Now - with puff pastry dough, you really need the oven temp to be higher than that - in the 400s - in order for the fat to melt and create enough steam quickly to puff up the layers of dough. 

But the pie recipe calls for a starting temp of 375, so that's what I went with, because I didn't know what another 50 degrees or so might do to the filling.  Maybe I'll try it some time with a single-sized pie, but I wasn't about to experiment on this one.

Anyway, I baked it at 375 for about 25 minutes - longer than the directions called for, but I figured the extra time was justified due to tripling of the recipe.  Then, per the recipe, I dropped the temp down to 300 and baked until the top was golden brown - about another hour. 

Voila!  As the pie cooled, the filling deflated a bit and dropped down til it was about level with the crust.

After it had cooled to room temperature, I put it in the fridge until it was thoroughly chilled.

In order to achieve the pizza look, I needed something to look like sauce, something to look like cheese, and some sort of topping.  I picked pepperoni - because it was the easiest thing to recreate.

I bought two boxes of raspberry FruitaBu.  After carefully selecting a round cookie cutter, each rectangle of smushed fruit provided me with two pieces of "pepperoni."

I wrapped the disks of fruit in plastic wrap so they wouldn't dry out or get stuck to anything and moved on to the sauce. 

I had picked up seedless raspberry jam for this.  I spooned some into a bowl and mashed it up with a fork until it was liquidy; then I spooned it around the edge of the pizza, where the filling met up with the crust, and randomly swirled some of it toward the center of the pizza. 

For the cheese...well, originally I was going to do some sort of brulee thing, in order to mimic the mix of yellowy cheese and darker, more well-cooked cheese on top of a pizza.  But since the lemon sponge already had that mix of shades, I just applied apricot jam all over it to make it look kind of, well, greasy.  And then I added the pepperoni, and set the pan in the box.

Will that be pick-up or delivery?   

Cakes - Calvin's Birthday 2007 - Chili Pepper

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, I had several birthday cakes to do for the same date.  One of them was for my nephew, Calvin.

Now, because I'm like I am, I have to state, before I show any pictures, that I wasn't 100% happy with how this one came out, but I should really just shut up about that because they're all learning experiences, and I already know what I'd do differently if I were to do this one again.

I decided to do a chili pepper because every time Calvin and his sister, Natalie, are at our house, my husband asks Calvin if he wants to eat a chili pepper, or some sort of really really spicy fiery hot sauce or something, and because Calvin is male, he says yes.  It's become a tradition to set your mouth afire at our house, and he seems to look forward to it.  I think it's some sort of male rite of passage.  Once he eats enough chili peppers, he'll grow a full beard and his voice will drop 8 octaves.  He'll be a MAN.  Just like my husband, the MAN.  The two of them sit there and eat tiny bites of a fresh pepper from the garden and then make panting, "hoooooooo...haaaaaaaaaa" kinds of noises, and their eyes water profusely, and their faces contort in pain.  Then they take another bite.  And try to coerce me into joining their little testosterone competition and then sneer at me because I'm too sensible to join in. 

Male bonding.  It's a beautiful thing.

Anyway, to get this cake made, I took two boxes of spice cake mix and left out the oil called for and substituted a 14 oz can of pumpkin puree.  I baked this in 4 loaf pans of various sizes, and they were my raw clay, so to speak.

Actually, I only ended up using 3 of the 4 loaves. 

First, I sliced each one in half through the middle and slathered on some canned chocolate frosting.

Then I trimmed them a bit and laid them out on the pan in the basic chili pepper shape I was copying.  Here's the pepper -

And here's the cake -

I used a plastic straw to support the part that sticks up over there.  It didn't really work well, but oh well, that's one of those learning experiences I mentioned.

Next up - coloring the fondant.  I chose green over red because I'd have needed an entire little jar of red to get the right shade, and I didn't want to spend an eternity kneading the color into the fondant.

By the way, Julia wanted to help, so I gave her some green fondant and a rolling pin and let her go to town. 

I rolled out the green fondant into a long, sort of sock-shaped piece...

and draped it over the cake.  Now, the problem was that I had more fondant than I needed, and I really hadn't thought about the logistics of the end part of the pepper that curled up.  So that's where I ran into trouble.  First off, the straw poked through the fondant, so I took that out.  But that end of the cake was so fragile that I couldn't really do much else other than to wrap the lengths of fondant around it and try to form the pointy end.  And here's how it ended up:

I sort of camouflaged the wrinkled end with "Happy Birthday Calvin" - but unfortunately I didn't take a picture of it at that point.

I am, however, rather proud of the stem end:

 

And that's the story of that cake. 

Cakes - Meredith's Birthday 2007

My sister's birthday is on Halloween, and as I have frequently done over the years, I made her birthday cake.  We had dinner at my parents' house on Friday, and actually it was a double birthday dinner - for both Meredith and for my nephew, Calvin, who, without any regard for his mother's feelings, has turned fifteen.  He's grounded until he stops this nonsense.

So actually I did two birthday cakes for the dinner - one for Mere and one for Calvin.  I also had a cake to do for someone at work who ALSO has a Halloween birthday, but he took his birthday off and so we had his cake on Friday, too.  And I had a really fun time getting all these cakes done.  I haven't done a lot of cakes in the past few years, but maybe I'll start drifting back into it.  We'll see.

Anyway, for my sister.  I think she's my favorite cake recipient.  For one thing, she always wants chocolate, and it's nice to bake for someone with such excellent taste.  The other reason, the main other one, is that I can lead her to believe I might do some sort of creepy cake, say, about her foot.  It's fun to torture her.  She's my baby sister, after all.  I've had a lifetime of practice.

I actually did toy with the idea of doing a foot-related theme - or a missing toe-relate theme - or something along those lines.  Halloween is the perfect opportunity to make creepy or gross cakes, after all.  But then I had another idea.

She took up crocheting around a year or so ago, and she's made hats and scarves and granny squares galore.  She made herself a hat - this one:

And for some reason, this hat has become a source of humor between the two of us.  And I can't really explain why, but you'll just have to take my word for it.

So that was my plan.  To make a hat cake.

The cake was (needlessly) five layers.  I have a fear of not making ENOUGH, so I make too much.  But that's okay - Mere was happy to bring home the leftovers.  Three layers were chocolate cake - just plain ol' chocolate cake from a box mix.  I used two boxes of mix, and three round cake pans - the 6", 8" and 12" ones.  And because this cake was for my sister, I wanted it to be extra specially yummy, so I made two layers of Boca Negra - 8" and 10". 

The Boca Negra recipe calls for bourbon, but I used some strong coffee instead.  It worked just fine.  Once those two layers were nicely chilled, I started to assemble the cake.  It was actually the last one I put together, and I have to say, even though it took the longest, it was also the most fun.

Here's a glimpse into my world this past Thursday night...

First - a look back at a bit of the Boca Negra in production...

That's the melted chocolate and the hot coffee and sugar syrup in there, and the lumps you see are some of the butter as I stir it in. 

That's the rest of the butter, room temp, cut into chunks, waiting to join the fun.

Here's one of the two pans of Boca Negra just before I placed them in the oven...

And here's one after it baked in the water bath for about 45 minutes....

Words CANNOT describe how absolutely sublime this is.  You'll just have to go make some for yourself.

Anyway, on to the construction of the cake.

I started with the 12 inch layer of regular cake, part of the top sliced off so it would be flat...

And on that I smeared some seedless raspberry jam, because raspberry and chocolate go oh, so very nicely together...

And onto that, I unmolded the 10 inch Boca Negra.  Now, when you make the Boca Negra, you line the bottom of the pan with parchment paper to prevent the cake from sticking. 

Something else to keep in mind is that if you have refrigerated the cake most of the day, it's going to be rather difficult to unmold it.  I hadn't thought of that when I was starting to assemble the hat, so after my moment of panic, I ran a towel under really hot water and sat the pan on that for a minute or so.  Then I held the edge of the pan against the edge of the first cake layer and then - IN ONE FELL SWOOP - inverted the pan onto the cake.

And - nothing happened.  At least not immediately.  But then I felt a barely perceptible change in the weight distribution in the pan, and next thing I knew, the Boca Negra had slipped right out and onto the first cake layer, nice and neat.  PHEW!

I peeled off the parchment, and spread a layer of Nutella on top.  Because hazelnut goes oh, so very well with raspberry and chocolate.

And then the 8 inch layer of cake and some seedless raspberry jam...

And then the next layer of Boca Negra and a smear of Nutella, and finally the little 6 inch cake layer.  Once all the layers were stacked, I carved the whole thing into the shape of a very large hat:

And now, as I'm looking at it, I notice that it's sort of listing to the left...I could make some sort of joke about that being an accurate representation of the shape of my sister's head, but I won't do that because it's not, and and plus she's a black belt in karate and she'll hurt me.

On to the actual HAT part of the adventure.  I set up my laptop on a counter near the work area and pulled up the image of her hat:

And I stared at it for a while to try to figure out how in the heck I was going to recreate THAT.  I get these CLEVER ideas...and then I have to actually figure out how to execute them.  I really question my sanity at times like these.

The best thing to do in a situation like this, is to take it slow.  Stare at the picture for a while...put some cake pans away...get a glass of water...check your email...you know - important creative stuff like that.

I decided I could at least make the colors.

   

I used fondant to construct the hat - I use it on a lot of my cakes.  I actually used to make it from scratch, years ago when I had tons of free time and no children.  Then I discovered that they actually sell the stuff ALREADY MADE!  I'm so with it.

Anyway, I decided on 6 colors - two shades of pink, one each of purple, blue, green, and yellow.

   

I started with the darker pink.  I used two different versions of pink - "aster mauve" and plain ol' "pink."  I smeared a glob (technical pastry chef term - don't mean to show off but the lingo is just a part of me at this point.  Oh, and no, I'm not a pastry chef, really.) of each color onto the white fondant, and then began to work the color into the fondant.  It can be messy, especially if, like me, you use a ton of food coloring from the outset AND you don't wear gloves. 

See those stains?  They don't wash out immediately.  And anything in the red family (or black, which, in the world of food coloring, is also part of the red family - and if you don't believe me, smear some black food coloring on your hand and then rinse it off.  Told you.) will leave pink stains on your hand or your work table or your countertop.  They will eventually come out, but not right then and there.  I went to work the next day with really pretty blotches on my hands.

Anyway - I basically start the coloring process by folding the dough over onto the blobs of coloring and then pressing down on it with the heel of my hand.  Then fold again and press, and smush it together with my hands, and squeeze it - okay, there is no real simple process.  Just do your best and try to keep the coloring off your hands as much as possible.

The lighter pink was just the aster mauve.  I also used juniper green, delphinium blue, a mix of delphinium and violet for the purple, and buttercup yellow for, yes, the yellow.  I think I may have added a dash of copper to it also.   And here they are:

Next step...how the heck do I crochet with fondant?  I can't even crochet with yarn.  So I stared at the picture some more...

And some more...

And some more...

 

And more,

...until my eyes hurt.  And I still didn't really know what I was going to do...but I figured, since it would involve crocheting or at least some sort of fondant faux-crocheting, I should make strands of some sort.

So I did that.  And they looked like this:

I actually tried a number of different methods to make the hat.  I will even admit that yes, I rolled a strand out fairly thin and tried to - yes - crochet it.  It kept breaking.  And oh yeah, I sort of lied when I said I couldn't crochet.  I am able to crochet a single chain, miles and miles long if necessary.  I just have no idea how to turn that into a hat or anything else.  But I figured it's a cake - it's not expected to be an EXACT replica.  At least not by anyone else except me. 

So first I smushed strands together in pairs - blue and pink, green and the other pink, purple and yellow.  Then I just sort of started at the base of the cake and made loops and ripples and squiggles, working my way around, joining the next strand pair to the one before it.  After this set, I made more fondant ropes, and this time I smushed three colors together, and then did the same loops and ripples and squiggles around the hat again.  It still didn't look as...well, as color saturated as I thought it should.  So then I started braiding.  And that's what did it. 

I pressed the strands together in pairs first, and then braided the three resulting strands into a braid.  And THEN I smushed the whole thing together into one single multi-colored strand.  And that, visually, was the best I could do.  (At least that's what I told myself.)

And now, the moment you've been waiting for (if you're still reading) - I give you, the hats:

I just laughed every time I looked at it in the fridge.  And the family seemed to get a kick out of it as well.  Yay.  Most importantly, it tasted really, really good.

You know, now that I've recapped the process, I'm thinking I could have just used the braided strands as they were, rather than squishing them together.  But I didn't at the time because I was trying NOT to make it look like a giant braid.  It was crocheted, dammit!  It must be ACCURATE!

I'm so goofy sometimes.