Cake and Campuses

 

CAMPUS VISITS: This morning, we worked hard to put the finishing touches on donation cake for Birthday Dreams. Once we got that done, we dropped it off at their office and headed south, Tacoma bound. We wanted to visit a couple of potential colleges for CJ, University of Washington Tacoma and Evergreen State College Tacoma.  

We've driven past the UW campus in Tacoma many a time. It's in a very urban setting, and just a bit south of the Tacoma Dome, in the city's arts/museum district. 

Parking was easy as the campus is deserted in these darn pandemic times. We walked the length of the campus east to west and back. There was lots of interesting architecture to admire. I think the building below, from the 1890s, is the oldest on campus.

Mid campus, there's a set of stairs leading up to a big W. I

In the middle of campus there are abandoned railroad tracks. Most of the campus' buildings flank the tracks.

We were so fortunate to have some blue skies during our visit!

There's an interesting art installation on site (see the blue squiggles below). It's a map of waterways, from local to Africa.

The photo below was the headwaters of the installation.

Random spotting: We found a solitary snail on a campus bench.

The UW campus is across the street from the Washington State History Museum, seen below. Pretty nice proximity for a history major who's interested in museum studies.

While in Tacoma, we also swung by the Evergreen State College campus. From a facilities standpoint,  it's significantly less grand than UW Tacoma. It's just one building and block was encircled by one of the biggest city camper encampments I've ever seen (and that's something coming from a person from Seattle). It has been so cold out, and we couldn't help but think of the human suffering going on in that block. 

We did a lot of talking after visiting both campuses today. CJ is more interested in the curriculum than the campuses, which I appreciate. I found a link to the list of history classes spring and winter quarter at UW Tacoma. It's super enticing to CJ. He was like a kid in a candy store reading it.

All things considered, he has as couple of questions an admissions counselor should be able to answer, but CJ is definitely seeing purple and gold. He's probably just a day or two from signing on the dotted line.

SWEET STUFF: We try to make sure to do at least one cake a month for Birthday Dreams. February is marching right along, so a couple of days ago, we checked out the Birthday Dreams wish list for a cake we could take on. We settled on a 15-year-old who didn't pick a theme for their cake but it was noted she loved teal and white. Honestly, it was harder to do one without a clear cut theme. We wanted to make something she'd love, but didn't know, exactly, what that would be.

We decided to do an over-sized cupcake cake. We'd done one a couple of times before, but it had been years. We used a Big Top Cupcake silicone mold we have. I remember using it about 4-5 years ago and not being thrilled with how the batter baked in the mold. I didn't remember what a kind of disaster it is. It's waaay too deep, so the sides and bottom and top brown and the middle is raw. No bueno. Ugh.

 

We were so unhappy with the way the top 'baked' that we pretty much threw it out. (We did salvage one slice from it to use in the bottom mold.)

We wound up salvaging it by making some small layers in the bottom part of the mold. We opted to make the top of the cake a Rice Krispies treat instead and iced that. You can't tell by looking at it that it's not cake, and really, most people love Rice Krispies treats, so I think it's OK.

One thing that did go really well was using teal candy melts to make a candy 'wrapper' to hold the base cake. It was really pretty and darn near perfect. And we worked *really* hard to make the icing for the 'normal' sized cupcakes match the candy melt teal color. I think we did a pretty good job of that!

One thing you can't really see in this photo is that the cake board is covered in marshmallow fondant that is embossed with words (like "fun" and "happy birthday" and graphics like cupcakes and party hats). Just another fun, custom touch we hope the birthday girl likes.

The roller is pictured on the left in the photo below.

And below is a shot of the early stages of building the candy melt cupcake 'wrapper' up.

If we do something similar in the future, I would just bake the cake in some of our 6-inch cake pans and then cut them down to fit in the bottom bold. The Rice Krispies atop worked great.