Cake Friday

In case you didn't notice, I have skipped a few Cake Fridays. Getting back into real life after the cruise has not been so easy, especially when I got glutened soon after. As I have started feeling better, I got the crummy news that it looks like there is even more stuff wrong with me than having gluten and dairy issues. The high levels of homocysteine I have in my blood (which puts me at about double the risk of stroke, heart attack, and Alzheimer's disease) is looking bad, and I now need to get another test done to see if I have a gene mutation that is contributing. At least, that is what I understand of it now. Apparently it is bad enough that I need to go in for a 45-minute consultation with the doctor, for which she insisted that I need to go into the office, and not have a phone consultation that I had hoped for. Bah, Humbug!

So there is my new sob story. I suppose I have not been taking the news so well, and have been extra emotional lately, so I figured my loving family was in need of a Cake Friday.

I had planned out making a chocolate cake with caramel in the middle (yep, dairy free caramel), but the sweetened condensed coconut milk I had previously made never made its way into caramel, despite the fact that I boiled it for five hours. I will be trying again in the future though, as the promise of caramel is just too great to resist. I followed the instructions here. I just ended up filling the cake with regular frosting and sprinkled mini chocolate chips in it.

I am quite happy with my progress with fondant. Even though the fondant I was using was a bit dry, so prone to cracking, I still had a much easier time with it than I did, say, a year ago. That is worth a little happy dance right there.

 Why pink and purple? I have no idea. My only guess would be that Princess has been asking to watch Tangled all day, so maybe I had some inspiration there. I was going to make more realistic gum paste roses, but Squirt was really wanting to "help", so I settled for easy ones. Spike also helped me make them; his is one of the ones on the bottom. :) As I was too flippin' lazy to make better piping frosting, I just used the kind I did for the filling. It is a bit gloopy and messy looking. However, the cake was promptly cut into about 10 minutes after I finished it, and no one complained about the unsightly icing.