Daisy Cake

Do other companies have as many potlucks as mine does? It seems like we have snacks brought in at least once a week.

Anyway.

Birthdays are big. In my new group, we either go out all together for lunch, or bring in snacks for the day. And there is one woman in my department who always seems to keep track of everyone's birthday, and is genuinely excited. She really is a lovely person! So we arranged a great big potluck, and I was assigned the cake.

As she's always been lovely to me, I wanted to make something particularly nice. I had big designs for it. A round cake cut out in to a simple star! Our group isn't very big, so a single ::cough::mix::cough:: would be plenty; a white cake made with egg whites fluffs up more than the average cake. Perfect!

Did you know that funfetti is basically white cake mix with sprinkles? Sprinkles are just compressed colored sugar bits; that's why they stain your ice cream. Not having a funfetti cake on hand, I figured I'd just add sprinkles and voila! Funfetti.

Um, sort of. Here was the start of the fail. I ... like sprinkles. Who doesn't? The more the merrier, right? RIGHT??

In hindsight, too many sprinkles upsets the delicate balance of the cake. When I went to drop it out of the pan to cool ... half of it stayed. Commence panic! Somehow my reputation as a master cake baker/decorator has been severely blown out of proportion and it was the day before I had to bring it in and omg a massive chunk was stuck to the pan!!!


You can see the fault line running through the right side of the cake. The toothpicks were meant to guide the star shape; really, they were holding things together. Tenuously.

I still worked on it much like a surgeon, still convinced I'd get my star. Once the sections were cut out, Andy announced, "It looks like a flower!" Not what I was going for. But good enough for me.

In middle school I took shop class because I thought it would be cool to build stuff. We made clocks, and I picked out a daisy shape. The colors are faded and the battery is dead, but my parents still have it on the wall (it's a nice clock). They also have my telephone pillow, but I digress.

The next fail was the icing. By now it was late, and I had two cans of pre-made icing to use. Perfect, right? Wrong! I had picked up this Betty Crocker whipped crap. Crap, I tell you. So for the decorations, I made up a little batch of my own icing. I just wasn't having it.

In the end, it came out alright! And it was gone by the end of the day, which is definitely a measure of success.

I was a little concerned that when it was cut, though, that the wrong "petal" would be cut and crumble. Which made me think of the "One bonbon is poision" cake (one petal is held together by frosting!) and made me laugh. You have no idea how much I want to make the poison bonbon cake.

Me: Be careful when you cut it! It's not ... structurally ... sound.
Coworker: OK, then ... we won't walk on it.

Touche.