The third time is NOT the charm! But who cares!
/Judah's birthday was on the 5th.
He loves rainbows. Each year when I ask him what kind of cake he wants, he doesn't tell me a flavor, he tells me the colors - of the rainbow. He loves rainbows because they represent the promise that God made. And because they are beautiful and he loves colors. The older he gets the more I notice how visual he is. We have that in common. He gushes about decorations I put up and the number of string lights and lamps in our home. He likes to decorate and make things look beautiful. I love that about him.
This year, again, he chose a rainbow cake. When he said it I had flashbacks to the pinterest nailed it board worthy cakes I made him the past two years. His fourth, fifth and now sixth birthday, I've completely failed at making an equally beautiful and delicious "rainbow cake". My cakes tend to come out well in the taste department and some times come out pleasing to the eyes, but unfortunately only 1 of the 3 rainbow cakes I've made him deserved a second look - or glance and shrug. I was told this year's cake was cute, but I thought it looked a bit ridiculous. There was last year's cake, which was OH so cute to see, but the tragedy was that the inside, which I painstakingly mixed, colored, baked separately, wrapped and froze several days ahead of time turned into not much more than a brick and had little flavor to detect. We had friends over for the evening and one of them, after complimenting the way the cake looked, said something to the effect of having looked upon many a beautiful cake that didn't taste the nearly as beautiful as they looked. Little did she know that this cake would top that pile. Here's the outside before the ugly, barely edible truth was revealed within.
We cut into it and took a pic of Judah smiling about all the colors. See here as Elijah gives a prophetic thumbs down, alongside a thumbs up.
Most of the cake was left on plates as I cleared the table and I reassured our gracious guests that they need not feel a bit bad about it. I made jokes that one almost needed a steak knife to cut through the layers of color.
The first year, his fourth birthday, this was the outward outcome. This year I was trying to make pourable icing and it failed miserably. On THIS cake, I did NOT want the icing to run and it did nothing BUT run! I have no recollection of what kind of cake was hiding underneath the artery clogging ROYGBIV. The jumbo marshmallows and their factory produced taste were worth more time chewing than the overly colored goop was to slurp.
Now we come to this year's cake. Judah and I surfed a while online looking for the perfect 3rd time is a charm to make. We found this picture and I thought, gosh, THAT one would be really difficult to screw up. Kind of like hot glueing a bunch of crayons to the top of a canvas and then sticking a blow dryer on them to make them run would be really difficult to screw up. But the only successful attempts at that project were the 3 pictures that made it to Pinterest boards 4 years ago, inspiring you and me to waste an entire box of Crayolas and a perfectly good canvas for no reason. Speaking of melted crayons, my husband's comment, after he said he thinks the cake is adorable, was to put a bundle of brand new crayons in the center to make it look like it's intentional - a crayon cake. That would have been SWEET! But alas, every crayon in our house has been broken into tiny barely holdable peices or chewed on or stripped of it's wrapping so that just wouldn't work. So, enough about the melted crayon look - the frosting I made was supposed to be pourable - it was not. It did anything but. It dripped and then froze in place.
I'd read about pourable frosting and was told store bought works the best when you melt it, but not all the way. I hate the taste of store bought frosting, so I set out to make my own. But then what I read said butter separates when you melt it in the frosting, so I thought..."Hmm. You can substitute coconut oil in baking, so why not in frosting?!" MIS.TAKE! Bleh! It tasted good, but had to be microwaved to a boil between each pour - and the more times I microwaved each little mason jar of frosting, the harder it became and the more the oil seperated from everything else. Little red splatter marks on my forearms were the reward for my frantic mixing of the frosting in the jars to mix the stubborn oil back into the sugar - much of the oil made it out of the jars onto the counter or my apron or my skin. I laughed my way through the process,. When the entire surface was littered with color, I set the jars aside and stood back to assess the damages. I decided it needed some intervention
To attempt a redemption of the base of the cake where the non runny frosting was chipping off I had the brilliant idea of putting a layer of "clouds" with buttercream frosting. I've been known to make some pretty killer buttercream in my time, but today I was out of powerdered sugar, so I had to make my own. Do not believe the claims you read online about blended sugar turning into perfectly fluffy and non grainy powdered sugar. It.does.not.work. The frosting was heavy, grainy, very strange tasting and I didn't make enough to go all the way around the cake, so only 2/3 of the rainbow had clouds.
I pushed the pile of melted crayon wax and heavy grainy clouds to the back of the counter and started the grunt work of cleaning up. I tried boiling the jars, I tried microwaving them again and I tried running the hottest tap water I could get into them. It took a butter knife and some serious ice picking to get the frosting out of the bottom of the jars. I ran the food disposal and hot water for a healthy long while after each jar was emptied of it's colored cement.
The recipe I used was for a gluten free vanilla pound cake. While the cake rose beautifully and lived up to the raving reviews about it being good textured and delicious, it lacked salt and I didn't think to add any until after it was baked. Bum deal. It needed salt. That would have meaned that at least the inside would be the way I intended it to be - one of the two parts of the cake would have turned out - if only for the salt! I laced the white glaze with salt and that helped it, but only the outer layer. Many plates were left with the middles.
I put my best foot forward as I put the cake on the table in front of Judah. He never saw the missing portion of clouds and was simply delighted with the cake, but my picture of him blowing out the candles shows the bare, naked truth. In the end he loved his cake, and didn't care a bit about all the things I'd laughed through while making it. He took two bites and was ready to move on to gift opening.
Happy birthday to our fierce Judah!
