He's Just Too Pretty to Eat

Lightning McQueen was not at all what this cake was supposed to be. I had planned to make a plain rectangular cake that would be easy to cover with fondant as this was my first time using the stuff. But somewhere in the process I got carried away and decided I would make a car cake. Actually, I can pinpoint the exact point where I started to veer off my charted course. I was standing over my cake, looking at it quizzically when Dad walked in. The cake was supposed to be three layers but I am not the best at cutting in straight lines so it ended up being two and a half layers as the third one fell apart and I could only salvage half of it. Dad looked at the cake and cautiously asked me what I was making in the same way you would ask a three year old to tell you about their drawing so as not to offend them when you say they’ve drawn a beautiful horse and they say it’s actually a tractor. I replied that I wasn’t exactly sure. This gave Dad the green light to tell me that he thought it looked like a car. And you know what? It did. If I squinted really hard I could imagine a polished race car. Of course the end result was far from what I imagined, but it was still kind of cute.

Working with the fondant was tricky business, or more accurately, sticky business. Once you laid it down, changes were not to be made. And the more I worked it between my hands, the warmer and stickier it got. Also, the more red my hands got. The red dye was quite good at spreading itself everywhere but into the fondant. Actually rolling out and shaping the fondant wasn’t much easier. See, I often have lofty visions of what I think something should look like but I don’t have the ability to execute my visions. This leads to a lot of frustration on my part because of my poor memory which prevents me from remembering that my imagination exceeds my ability. In my head, I’m Duff Goldman. Reality disagrees.

As neat as fondant looks, I can’t say it stands up in the taste department. This pains me because that fondant exterior is hiding Dorie’s Dressy Chocolate Loaf cake and Chocolate Malt Buttercream icing. The cake and icing are rich, chocolaty and certainly worthy of being served on their own but can anything really compete with Lightning McQueen? Given the choice between a brown loaf cake or a jazzy red Lightning McQueen cake, it’s hard to pick the former. In order to satisfy both looks and taste, we enjoyed Lightning as long as possible and then peeled off the fondant exterior to reveal the cakey goodness inside. Some brave souls attempted to pick at the fondant but in the end I was left with a crumpled and deflated Lightning McQueen and not a crumb of Dorie’s cake. The final picture was just too sad to post, I want you to remember Lightning in all his glory, supported by cake and so those are the only pictures I’m sharing.

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Cake + Dorie Greenspan + Fondant + Cars