Any excuse for cake is alright by me… and if that excuse happens to have a dastardly looking skeleton on it, its a much better excuse. The only problem with this little experiment was, I had to learn how to bake, frost and make pretty edges on a cake.
So I had the ingredients… a delicious squishy (moist?) cake mix, lots and LOTS of frosting, and a Lucks Edible Image Pirate Skull. Yar! Now it was time for cakeness. I prepared the ingredients according to the directions on the box, made sure to grease the pan so I could get it out without crumbling it to pieces. It still somehow managed to rise the most in the center, despite me doing nothing to avoid it. Hey, I tried, I’m no Martha or Betty.
So I managed to get the cake out of the pan, and was instructed to very gently caress the frosting over the cake with my spatula until it was even, and then smooth it out. I… Uh… HELP! I’m more apt at making jokes about caressing things. Thankfully one of my amazingly domestic friends was there to hold my hand and put it into terms I could understand. “Frosting Witness Relocation Plan” was put into action. We successfully and gently re-located all of the clumps around the cake, guarded them before each trial, and made sure things went “smoothly” in the end.
She then taught me how to put frosting in a little bag with a tip on it and squeeze out a decorated edge. I mixed the frosting color, which explains the undead and decomposing grey tones I used. I will never use simple food coloring again, not when I can use AmeriColor Soft Gel Paste Food Color. (My frosting didn’t dissolve when it touched the coloring!)
The Edible Image was amazingly easy to use… So easy in fact it was the only part of the project I didn’t need expert opinion on. It is a one-shot deal, so if your doing it make SURE you know EXACTLY where your placing the image and try to lay it down flat to avoid bubbles. Its literally a peel and place decoration, like putting a sticker on only a bit more fragile. I *should* have experimented with a colored background, as I now wonder with how well the edges seemed to vanish into the cake, if it would do the same with, say a bright blue or other such obnoxiously colored confection.
