Ele-fun

TAKES THE CAKE: Recently, a friend asked if we'd make some cake and/or cookies for her baby shower. We said, 'Sure!"

We spent a couple of hours on the Internet looking for inspiration, and pitched a couple of ideas to the friend. One of the things I noted was that, for whatever reason, elephants are a popular pick for baby shower decor. I'm not sure what elephants have to do with people's pregnancies.  Maybe it's because they're pregnant for two years, and that's what it feels like to human mothers?

Regardless, said friend loved the elephant idea, and so that's what we went with. One of the first steps in the cake process was drawing up a design. We decided on a two-tiered cake: A 10-inch round on the bottom, and a 6-inch round on top.

I told my friend the favorite cake we bake is a banana one with peanut butter icing. She thought that sounded great, so we went for that for the base cake.

One thing I did differently this time, is between the three layers, instead of just peanut butter filling, I incorporated a layer of actual salty cocktail peanuts. I got the inspiration from a book I got for Christimas, "All About Cake." Its author, Christina Tosi, has a very successful bakery that is known for its cakes, which is ironic, because the author said she never really liked cake, and so she spent some time coming up with new twists to make it something worth eating. One of the things she almost always does is introduce an element of crunch to the cake equation.

Inspired by that thought, we added a layer of salty, crunchy, chopped up peanuts to our peanut butter filling on the banana cake. I'm guessing it was yummy, because my friend said people at the shower kept asking her who made the cake.

Decorating is always the most fun part. The bottom tier of this project was bordered with giant silver gumballs and adorned with cute little fondant elephants.

The top tier received a fondant border, and then blue candies were used as polka dots.  Both tiers were covered in a 'crusting' buttercream, that is smoothed with a special tool and towel to make rather resemble the smoothness of fondant.

Annabelle did most all of the decorating!

Another first for us on this cake: We made and used modeling 'chocolate.'

Truth be told, it's not really chocolate at all, it's candy melts. They are melted, mixed with some corn syrup and tinted. Then the material sets up into a Play-Doh like consistency. It can be molded and then it sets up hard and retains its shape (unlike fondant, which can't really be used for sculpting because it slumps).

We put our little edible elephant atop a blue fondant blanket. We used the mesh of a kitchen strainer to give the blanket some texture.

Each tier was iced with a crusting buttercream that can be smoothed out with a special paper towel and tool to resemble fondant.

We also decided to make a couple dozen elephant cookies. We used our favorite vanilla-orange sturdy cookie recipe, and make marshmallow fondant for decorating them. 

Little decorating details included black nonpareils for eyes, hearts for ears, and even little white tusks. 

So, funny story about the cookies. We actually 'got' to make them twice. ...

You see, the first time we made them, right after we finished them (on plastic trays with covers), we had to leave the house for a couple of hours. Our dog Laika has developed the unfortunate habit of foraging when we leave the house, and I was worried about her getting them. Fortunately, I had a 'brilliant' idea! We could put the trays in the (cold, off) oven for safe keeping. Perfect!

Fast forward five hours, when it's time for me to stick some cake pans in the oven. Naturally, the first step was preheating the oven. ...

Can you guess what's coming next?

Within three to five minutes, a 'funny' smell is wafting through the kitchen. You know, that unmistakable burnt plastic smell. ...

I ripped open the oven and a toxic cloud of blue smoke billowed out. And the inside of the oven was quite a sight to behold. 

So now you know what 'twice-baked' elephant cookies look like. 

The trays pretty much liquefied. 

It was a gawdawful mess! And the worst part of it was that I REALLY needed to bake the cake to make our deadline. But I wasn't about to stick cake batter into an oven that smelled like a disaster at the plastic factory. So, I cranked the oven up to 500, and every 5 minutes, I'd open it up and use a waving towel to help move the air out the back door.

This process went on for about a half hour. Once most all of the plastic was,  in effect, burned off, I then contemplated how to remove the odor in the oven.

I decided to try a lasagna pan full of vinegar, for starters. I let that bake for about a half hour, and then put a saucepan with vanilla water in it in the oven.

Fortunately, those things seemed to work, and I then felt OK about baking the cake.

Believe it or not, my reaction to seeing the melted mess was uproarious laughter! It was so terrible and yet so funny at the same time. 

Fortunately, the cookies weren't some of my hand-painted, intricately detailed ones. 

And I learned an important lesson. I certainly won't make that mistake twice!