Jeff's Birthday Cake... Wreck

Ever since working at Coldstone in high school as a Cake Manager and decorator, I have enjoyed making and decorating cakes.


I tend to try and be creative, such as my campfire cake I made for Gan last year, and the bathtub Gan and I made for Megan...

Ha ha.

But I also made my wedding cake, as well as my cousin Brea's wedding cake...



Even though frosting everywhere and rock hard fondant are a pain in the butt, I've really enjoyed being creative in decorating cakes.


So, this year for Jeff's 25th birthday he wanted an ice cream cake, and since ice cream is really hard to cut into a shape, I was trying to come up with something cylindrical... I asked him if he had any requests, to which he first said, "a basketball." After I told him a basketball was round, he said, "Ok then, a tree stump. Or a water tower." Ha ha. He cracks me up.


But I got thinking of all the puns that can result from tree stumps, and decided to go for it...


Maybe I should just stop this post right here, with your coutesy chuckle still sounding in my ears...


But no, because I'm me, and have to tell you about the rest of it.


Well, apparently a 9 inch spring-form pan is too wide for the amount of ice cream I bought, half a gallon... and since we definitely don't need more than that for just the two of us, I didn't bother getting more. So It turned into a wide flatish stump...


Last year when Jeff wanted an ice cream cake, I complied and it turned out even more disastrous, so much that I didn't even post a picture of the cake, just a slice:

But it tasted good, despite the slightly too dry cake. This year I wanted to try something else besides normal cake mix to see if it'd be more moist.


So I went for a crushed/pressed chocolate chip cookie bottom with hot fudge on it, with a brownie layer in the middle... sounds really nice and cool looking and yummy right?


Well... the crushed cookie layer turned out to be about 3 millimeters thick and it just stuck to the bottom of my pan, and we had to scrape it out in pieces. The brownie layer turned out to be really thick, and you can't even tell there's an ice cream layer between the cookie and brownie layers. I would've liked to have been able to make the frosting look more like bark, but it just kept clumping and melting the ice cream too fast to even spread well (repeat of last year...) and I kept having to put it back in the freezer every few minutes. Plus once it was all said and done, we peeled off the frosting because it tasted nasty with the ice cream and brownies for some reason...




Oh well. The brownie and ice cream was really good together! With that occasional chunk of cookie dough in the ice cream, I'd say it wasn't a complete failure...


Signing off till next year's wreck...


Lindsey,
the girl with the over-zealous cake images in her head that rarely turn out as planned...