As any cook/baker can tell you, sometimes your projects just fail. It may not be something you did wrong, it may just be the recipe, or in this case, the design. One of my best friends celebrated her 18th birthday this month, and I decided I wanted to go all out and build her one fantastically awesome rainbow birthday cake. Mishap number one? Putting me in charge of building something structurally sound...
I had this awesome idea in mind. Build a 3D rainbow cake that could be viewed from all sides. Now I'm sure people much more experienced than me would be able to do this no problem. I however, cannot. I am not a cake person. I am a cookie, cupcake, pie type person. I have no artistic ability. Anyways, I decided to make her a cool 3D cake out of mini cupcakes. It was a brilliant idea in my head. There would be a layer of mini cupcakes dyed each color of the rainbow, with white butter cream icing on either side for clouds (thanks for Maggie for helping with the somewhat hopeful design plan). In my head, it looked amazing. I had everything planned out. Sort of. I had no idea how I was going to make the rainbow 3D. That's where my awesome on-call buddy Christina helped. She realized that we could take aluminum foil and fold it multiple times to make a really sturdy base rainbow shape. It actually worked out quite well. I also needed a base. That part was simple. I took a foam-core poster and painted it green with a powered sugar/cornstarch mixture dyed green. The resulting base was quite awesome.
I started out simple. I made double the amount of a basic white cake mix. So far, so good. Then I portioned out the mix. The mini cupcake pans holds about a tablespoon of batter in each well. This amount makes the perfect sized cupcake. So I started ladling out tablespoons of batter into each of the colored coffee cups I had set out to hold the different colors. I started with 12 tablespoons of purple (the smallest layer) and ended with about 28 tablespoons of red (the biggest layer). Needless to say, I had to repeat the whole basic white cake batter thing more than once but when I finished, the dyed batter looked pretty cool. I definitely recommend the gel food coloring. The colors were very vibrant and the gel didn't change the chemistry or taste of the cake batter.
Once the cake batter was all set, I started baking up some cupcakes. Honestly, this was the simple part. It was just a methodical step by step process. Grease pan, pour batter, bake for ten minutes, let cool for five, repeat process. It took about two hours to bake all the cupcakes I needed (almost 140). The baked cupcakes were very colorful and the perfect size.
Once all the cupcakes were baked and cooled I began tackling the tough part: putting the cake together. This was seriously a headache. I succeeded in putting the bottom two layers on the aluminum foil structure before the whole thing started falling. The generic sticky frosting mixture that I was using to glue the cupcakes together wasn't holding up to the weight very well. I was still determined to make it work though, so I pulled out the handy wooden skewers. These bad boys were stuck into the foam-core poster to keep the tower of cupcakes from falling left or right. This actually worked till the last layer. Everything fell again. I was frustrated at this point, and almost decided to make the 3D rainbow cake 2D, but my roommate, Megan, helped me put the whole thing back together. After I put the last red cupcake on the top layer of the rainbow, I piped the butter cream icing on both sides of the rainbow, hoping this would help stabilize the structure (it did). Then I started piping every hole I found in the layers with the sticky icing, hoping that this would keep them together. It did....for an hour.
Even with the wooden skewers, the butter cream (which is actually tinted yellow and not white, thanks to me messing up...), and the sticky icing this cake never had a chance. You see the right side of the rainbow? That one little part that's starting to cave? Yeah...not even an hour later, this is what happened.
Ten minutes after I snapped this picture, the entire right side crumbled.
Amazingly, the left side was sound. It didn't move at all. Weird right? Once the cake crumbled, I cried. Literally. I had been working on this cake for at least four hours, and an entire side crumbled. I had given up, when my awesome roommate (did I mention she is frickin' amazing) decided that it was fixable. Sure enough, we managed to fix it. Somewhat. Now, me and Taylor share a love of all things kid. There's a reason a 21 year old and an 18 year old are best friends. It's cause we are both kids at heart. Megan had the brilliant idea that we could turn the right side into a dinosaur. Seriously this girl is fantastic. So we tore apart the right side, and Megan built a dinosaur out of the remaining butter cream. She sculpted this really cool dino and took a skewer and food coloring to bring it to life. Seriously cool.
While Megan was sculpting away, Dani (she was visiting and just happened to witness the great meltdown of rainbow cake stress-dom) helped me crumble some cake to put behind the dino and make another small tower of each color to put in front of him to make it look like he is destroying the rainbow. The end result was this hilarious mistake of a cake that turned out pretty epic. I wrote "Happy Birthday Taylor!" on the board in edible marker, and we took plenty of pictures just in case it managed to fall (it didn't :D). Taylor came over right after we finished, and had a happy giggly fit over it. I'm pretty sure she was more interested in the fact that the green "grass" was edible than the fact that there was a dino on her cake. She kept licking the board (wish I would've taken pictures of that). After she took pictures and ogled over it, I took it all apart and put it in a neat little Tupperware container.In the end, what turned out to be a brilliant idea epically failed, and I was left with the ingeniousness of my roommate and her dino. I think I actually prefer the dino cake with all it's mistakes and quirkiness over the original idea anyways. :D Moral of the story? Even if your original idea completely fails, something good always comes out of it. I spent five hours making a 3D rainbow cake and ended up with a fabulous design that we lovingly titled "Dino-rawr Tasted The Rainbow".
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