Anger Burger

This is probably the best birthday cake I’ve ever made, even if I did run out of frosting before I could pipe a decent border around the bottom:

I was a little stressed about the butt-smears around the board, but I got over it.  I also wanted to cover the sides (not the top) with silver sprinkles, but the whole cake was so fucking heavy that we couldn’t even tilt it 5 degrees to the side without danger of catastrophic structural failure.  So I just threw some sprinkles on the top and called it a day.  Grandpa certainly doesn’t give a shit, why should I?

Anyway, my mom and I have dutifully chugged through a lot of yellow cake recipes in an effort to find something as junky and delightful as boxed cake mix.  Long story short: I found my holy grail, and it’s Shirley Corriher’s “Magnificent Moist Golden Cake”.  I hijacked the recipe from Cookie Madness based on the photograph alone.  It looked so unnaturally shaggy and fluffy, and then the recipe itself is so weird (trust me — just read it) that I was entranced.  And it was perfect.  Aside from one small thing: it makes very little actual cake.  Cookie Madness split the batter between two round pans, but you can see from her photo what a short cake it makes.  My cake above is two whole recipes mixed separately and baked separately in two 9×13 cake pans.  It was a little bit of a pain in the ass, but the batter is easy enough to put together and the end result was awesome.

For the record, Joy the Baker’s “Best Chocolate Buttercream” is actually the best (though I leave out the plain milk to keep the texture more spreadable).  For reals.  Don’t skip the Ovaltine (you can’t identify the malt flavor) and follow her instructions.  It’s not the ingredients that makes the buttercream, it’s the motion of the ocean, if you know what I mean and I think that you do.

AND!  I’m going to shut up about this cake soon, but if you have any edible writing to do,  the Wilton Fondant Icing Writer is totally worth the $3 it’ll cost you.   So, so much better than mixing together a tiny quantity of icing and making a little parchment writing tip.  I will truly never endure that garbage again.  It dries hard and comes in bright colors.

I’ll tell you more about this banana pudding later:

The recipe makes something like 7 quarts and we were certain we’d end up throwing away at least half of it.  So of course it was totally obliterated before I even got a serving of it.  True story.  I was told it was delicious, but I have no goddamn firsthand knowledge of this.

My sister’s brilliantly doofy salami/cheese/olive horns.  This salami was really too big, but you use what you’ve got.  You roll the salami, stick one end in an olive and use a piping bag or a snipped ziplock to full the horn with cream cheese or Alouette or Boursin  if you’re rich.

I didn’t catch who made this or how they made it, but it was rad.  It was fresh corn (I could tell because a lot of the kernels were still stuck together) and beans in a mild sauce, but for some reason it was magic.  Maybe it was the pumpkin tureen.

This landscape.  You’re familiar with it, I hope?  I mean, whatever your family’s version is, but basically a vast accumulation of unidentifiable salads and dips.  And a random jar of pickles thrown in, because when has that ever gone badly?

Here my cousin’s daughter demonstrates how to smell a spoon to try and suss out what the hell you’re putting on your plate.   She hasn’t yet learned to just put in on the plate and eat it.

It warms my heart to know that other people have cake disasters, too.  Of course it still tasted good.

No one can accuse us of being a multicultural family, that’s for sure.

This is Dolores, she’s the one that arranged this.  I barely had a chance to talk to her because I was busy eating.  But I think she knows that’s how I express my love.