I assumed that making the cake was going to be the easy part. Boy was I wrong. The cake that was ordered was a key lime cake. I knew I had to double my recipe in order to make a 9in layer cake, so I (stupidly) assumed that tripling the recipe was going to be enough for each half of the sheet cake. Ha, right... the tripled batch made a layer that was too thin to torte. What I ended up doing was baking the tripled batch 4 times - each batch made 1/2 of a single layer - so when all was said and done I had multiplied the recipe by 12, I had gone through 2 dozen eggs, over a pound of butter, an entire bag of flour, an entire bag of sugar, 4 bottles of key lime juice, 4 lbs of powdered sugar, and 9 limes. Ridiculous, I know. If that wasn't crazy enough, the frosting used 3 quarts of heavy whipping cream and over a tub of piping gel (used t stabilize the whipped icing).
So once all the baking was done (which took 2 days of baking after work), I had to frost the sucker. Since the cake had a key lime syrup over it to keep it moist and give it flavor, it stuck like a champ to the cooling racks as I was trying to slide it onto the cake board. C had to hold the rack while I slid (aka shoved) the cake. Once the assembly and frosting was done, it was time to put the cake into the fridge until delivery time. Now, I knew that the cakes just fit side by side when they weren't on the board, but I assumed (again, stupidly... funny how that works, huh?) that it would be fine to fit into the fridge. Nope. Good to know that a full sized sheet cake on a board definitely does NOT fit. We ended up cutting off part of the board with an exact-o knife and then basically shoving the hogillion pound cake (who would have thought all of those ingredients would weigh so much...?) into the fridge. And of course, the sides of the cake hit the sides of the fridge, and the door bar had to be removed so it wouldn't smash in the front of the cake. So there I am, practically in tears because I've been working on this stupid cake for 3 stupid days and it can't even fit into the stupid fridge without getting messed up. Stupid. And of course as I'm sitting there being emotional about the hot mess that's in my fridge, C is trying to be rational and explain that I learned something valuable, and that it was good experience/practice... yaddah yaddah peanuts teacher face. I know he meant well and that's one of the reasons I love him, but emotional me is a craptastic listener, so I'm afraid all of his words of wisdom were spent on the dogs (who were of course there for support - and to lick the frosting off the side of the fridge).
When all was said and done, the woman who ordered the cake was happy, I got to add money to the baking jar, and hopefully you all got a laugh from the mental image of me sitting on the floor covered in whipped cream icing in front of an open fridge cursing at an inanimate object.
Pictures!
In the fridge:
I know it's Sunday, and I'm supposed to post about cupcakes, but hopefully this post will do. I did make the cupcakes, but it's time for me to log off and get ready for the work week, so I'll post about them later. But in the meantime, here's what they look like:
Enjoy!
Poor cheesy!
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