Thursday, October 29, 2009

Cake Making With Erika!





This week began the United Way campaign at work. I love it when United Way time rolls around. Not necessarily because I love supporting the United Way, but more because it’s like a three week long fall festival at work. There’s popcorn every afternoon; Bingo on Wednesdays (I Bingoed twice yesterday!); and all sorts of other games and contests throughout the campaign. It’s fun and it makes work so much more exciting.


Today we are having an extreme cake contest. I think this is the first year we have ever done this. Yesterday, at the last minute, I decided I was going to enter the extreme cake contest, and who better to recruit for help than the lovely Erika – extreme baker herself!





Obviously I've known Erika a long time!


Erika swung by my house after work where I had buffalo wings and French fries at the ready for her dinner. (Nope, I didn’t make those; they came from Best Wings – so good!)






While Erika was eating dinner (I was rude and scarffed mine down as soon as I got home with them) I mixed up the cake and put it in the oven. The cakes finished baking just about the time Erika finished eating.







After the cakes cooled, it was time to slap on the icing. I’m terrible at icing cakes so I let Erika do this handy work.












While she was icing the cake, I made ghosts out of marshmallows and also some homemade tombstones.













After Erika finished icing the cake, I stuck in the ghosts and tombstones. While I was doing that, Erika began her attempt to make spiders inspired by Bakerella.





Sticking in the tombstones.




Erika's got the chocolate ready for those spiders!





Let’s just say that Erika is going to stick to cake making, rather than spider making.



Since we had so much room on the cake board and the spiders didn’t turn out as planned, Erika came up with the idea that we should spell RIP on the cake board with licorice. After contemplating how to do it, she decided we should cut the licorice in small pieces and then spell it out. We were going to glue it doen with icing, but that wasn’t working too well. So, we went for the Elmer’s Galactic Glue, which we kept calling galaxy glue. We also sang about the galaxy glue, but you don’t want to read about our fits of insanity.






Elmer's Glue - you can't beat it, but don't eat it!




The Tide was hoping for a crumb or two



We really needed an official photographer to come and document our progress in the kitchen, but Tony was redesigning his drum set and couldn’t make it. I haven’t quite figured out my new camera yet, but Erika brought hers and took a picture of us using the auto timer. She’s supposed to send it to me today and when she does, I’ll post it on here along with an update on the outcome of the cake contest.





Yes, I used the name Cornelia Marie - I hope I didn't put a curse on the boat by doing that!



The finished product turned out awesome in my opinion. If it doesn’t win first place then I’m demanding a recount and am going to ask about the hanging chads. The cake we were making was a Martha Stewart creation. Ours didn’t turn out quite as polished as Martha’s. I consider it the Alabama version of Martha’s cake.





Our cake compared to Martha's




The finished product!




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