It makes me sad that I’m not taking the time to bake much
anymore. It drives me crazy because I
LOVE baking! Hubster and I started a
diet – you know – the annual New Year’s diet and we’ve done reasonably
well. Except we’re not losing weight
despite watching the calories and exercising … apparently old age is making that fat really determined. So anyway, I
apologize for the lack of posts here.
But we’re getting into birthday season around here, so I’ll have a few
days of baking. Yay!
Youngest son’s birthday was last week. He’s my lemon-loving baby, so I stuck with my
usual lemon cake and frosting recipe – the one I used for his wedding
cupcakes. Duelling Lemon Cupcakes He’s
also the world’s biggest Garfield fan, so when we were out garage “sailing”
last summer and came across a cake pan with 4 small Garfield faces for A BUCK
(!!!) we grabbed it right up and kept it a secret.
The first victory of the day is that I was able to find the cake pan
months later. I credit that to having
started the Great Purge of 2014. I’ve
committed to removing excess STUFF around here this year and am going room by
room, clearing out unused things. Almost
through the kitchen now, where I started.
I have a lot of things going on at the shop right now so The Purge is in
a holding pattern for a couple more weeks.
The second victory was being able to get the Garfield faces
out of the pan. I was in a hurry and you
know that’s when everything goes wrong, so I figured that would be my first
problem. I used Baker’s Joy spray and
then floured that just to be sure. To
tell you how long it’s been since I last baked, when I started to spray the pan
the spray went everywhere BUT the pan – the nozzle clogged – but my kitchen
cupboards got a nice washing. Timing for
that could have been better, but what are you going to do? LOL
Once the cakes came out of the pan safely, I used the remaining batter
and made 10 additional cupcakes.
As I said, I was in a hurry and I regret not having taken a
picture of the cakes when they came out of the pan. I was a bit intimidated because, an artist –
I’m NOT. My stick people are
unrecognizable. There were no
instructions or a picture to go by to do the decorating, so I hunted around
online for instructions, a picture … anything … and finally found a tiny
picture of what the cakes were supposed to look like. Garfield Cake Pan
I mixed up the orange icing and yellow icing and I keep a
tube of pre-made black frosting around then took a deep breath. Standing there, looking at those cakes, I
wondered why I thought this was a good idea.
I had to draw on the memory of making recognizable birthday cakes from
dinosaur and Big Bird cake pans (and I even know where the pans are after all
these years!). I started with the
eyes. Two blobs of the white frosting,
smoothed onto the raised ovals on the cake.
It looked pretty good and I relaxed enough to continue.
Starting with the orange icing and star tip # I went around the side of
the first one. It didn’t take long for
the icing to get too soft to hold the star shape, but I decided Garfield is
hairy so … just kept sticking the icing in the freezer every few minutes. When it was time to tackle the face, I really
wasn’t sure where to start. It looked
like if I could follow where the yellow part was supposed to go, everything
else would fall into place, and it did.
I started piping the black accents with a round tip #8 because I’ve had
trouble with #2 and #3 tips. #8 was TOO BIG. I reduced to #6 on
the next cake and it was better, but I wasn’t happy. The #3 tip finally turned out to be the right
one and I didn’t have trouble – maybe because I was using pre-made icing or
maybe my hands have gotten stronger since it’s been almost a year since the
carpal tunnel surgery.
So here are the results and I’m pretty pleased with the
final version, considering I'm still a learner. It actually is recognizable as representing Garfield and it only took 4 tries!
What I learned
- · Remember that cream cheese frosting is too soft to work with using decorating tips.
- · I really can use the #3 tip successfully
- · Put the individual cakes on upside down saucers to lift them from a flat surface to make it easier to decorate the sides. The saucers are easy to turn. A large, round spatula easily slides under the cake to move it to your preferred serving plate.
When all was said and done, Youngest Son was surprised and
thrilled. Then he couldn’t bear to eat
one and mess it up. <head desk> I had to promise to make a fake cake so he
can hang one on the wall. I’m sure I’ll
be able to do that in my spare time. LOL
