If you need to be thanked in the acknowledgments for Emerald Blaze, please email me. I’ve got the Chinese and Hong Kong readers, the Italian reader, the legal reader, and I can’t remember who I am missing.
If you beta read this book, please email me, because I can’t be trusted. We are trying to finish the copy edit, get the web designer all the stuff, answer some professional questions, all at the same time, and I don’t know which way is up.
Yesterday, I made my husband a chocolate cake. I can do many things. Decorating cakes is not one of them. My cakes taste good. They do not look good. This particular cake took 4 hours. It has three layers of chocolate cake, strawberry filling, and Swiss meringue chocolate buttercream. It looks like so. It barely fit under the cake hood and needed dowels for structural integrity, just in case.
Yeah. So I presented this cake to my husband. Later on I see him returning from the kitchen with a little bowl of cake and ice cream.
Me: Decided to try the cake?
He: Not exactly. There was some cake pieces on the side, so I took that.
Me: …
He: Why let it go to waste?
He found the bits I cut off the cake to level it and ate that instead. O_o
He did have some this morning and profanity was used in describing the deliciousness of the cake, so I consider this to be a home run. 🙂
Got to go. Email me.
Netflix has a new show for cooking and baking fast hacks featuring Nadie from the Vreat British Bake Off. I forget the season that she was a winner. But it is SUCH A GOOD SHOW and I really like her – she’s fun. She has a short cut for chocolate mousse (15 mins) and other goodies too.
Carol, thank you for sharing the show! I love Nadiya, and I’ll definitely be checking it out now. It looks like it’s called Nadiya’s Time to Eat . 🙂
I am impressed with your Ziplock bag decorating. I have had to do that a few times when I ran out of pastry bags. Not so easy!
Glad Gordon enjoyed your efforts 🙂
I didn’t even know piping frosting was a thing until my very creative daughter became obsessed with Cake Boss! Growing up frosting was spread with a knife out of the silverware drawer and crumbs from a too warm cake just meant a ‘textured look’ & ‘cake-to-eat’ that much faster 😛 The cake is beautiful!
P.S. which means I am awed by all of you who even think to frost decoratively & creatively with a piping bag, let alone McGyver it with a Ziplock bag!
Well, you’re a 100% better cake decorator than me! I do not have enough patience to apply that much detail to something that smells that good. Ah, drooling! The cake at my house can barely make it off the cooling rack untouched! 😉
That cake sounds absolutely delicious! I’ve had my own struggles decorating cakes (haven’t we all), but watching a few YouTube videos to learn some tricks has really helped. And if you don’t have an offset spatula, using a (well cleaned!) paint scraper helps get the sides and top nice and even. Total lifesaver. Here’s a cake I spent like 30 minutes decorating, but man did the scraper and spatula help.
Happy Birthday Gordon, and belated to Kid 2!
Photo of the side. It was a 3 layer cake with cranberries inside and orange cream cheese frosting on top.
Pretty!
Yummy ????!! Beautiful!
Looks pretty fricken good to me! Your husband cracks me up 🙂
Okay, never do any of you get to see my cakes. Ugly is a nice description for them. I am diabetic so they are usually sugar free, but I barely frost because I think sugar free confectioners is yuck. They look bad and only taste good if you haven’t had cake in years. Still…. Cake is cake yummy.
LOL! You are correct, cake decorating is not one of your skills. However the fact that it tastes great and profanity was used to express how good it was far more important. It sounded very yummy. Gotta love Gordon!
Thank you as usual as your blog is a bright spot in a dark time.
I totally agree.
I hate decorating. For me it’s much more important which ingredients are used and that it tastes good. How often does it happen that something looks pretty but taste horrible ?!
Looking at that chocolate cake makes my teeth hurt…but in a good way. ????
Wow! looks delicious.
YAY for cake ….
Chocolate cake
Ooh ooh I know
Yellow cake with lemon meringue & white creamy frosting
Yummy looking cake! Just finished re-reading SAPPHIRE FLAMES! Wow! It was soooo …… good ! Better the 2nd or 3rd time around. I know he doesn’t fit the written description of Linus Duncan but I always see Morgan Freeman in my head when I’m reading him.Thank you both for many , many hours of reading pleasure . I’ve probably read them all at least 3 times each and some more than that.
So it sounds like you need to go on Nailed It!, haha.
Beautiful! Like a gorgeous flowing dress.
My sister used to be a professional cake decorator. Sigh… her cakes are like magic. My cakes don’t look great but they do taste yummy. So I say “whoot, whoot” to your three layered tower of chocolatey deliciousness.
The cake photo says, “This is what love looks like, baby!”
I don’t think it looks bad! That spikey stucco-like look is actually a thing. Just hold your head up and proudly say, “That’s the look I was going for!” All great art techniques are looked down on when they first come out. You are a trend setter. Own it, hun!
Or eat the evidence. Either way, you win.
Ohhhhh gawd! That cake sounds SO delicious. My birthday is coming up and I may steal the concept. I’m not the best artist when it comes to cake presentation, though I’ve gotten better over the years. Kind of ironic when you consider that I am a fine artist in oils. Guess it just doesn’t translate to cake sculpture, LOL!
That cake looks so yummy! I do have a picture somewhere of a cake I made for my son when he was 4 or so – your’s looks like a masterpiece for sure!
When there are bake sales in my home town the “ugly” cakes always sale first. They are the ones that taste the best, and are made with love.
I remember a line from a Robin McKinley book – something to the effect that “life is too short for cake decorating.” From SUNSHINE
P.S. which means I am awed by all of you who even think to frost decoratively & creatively with a piping bag, let alone McGyver it with a Ziplock bag!
That’s better than my cakes look. I’d totally chomp down on that. It looks delicious.
I hope you are all safe, healthy and happy. Even though I know you are stressed with the book release up and coming.
Ahhhh! All yall’s cakes are killing me because I have no ability in that area. I see them and want to eat them. End of story. It’s almost primal at this point.
That is an awesome cake
Your cake is beautiful and sounds delicious. Now I want cake.
I love the look of the cake. I have a saying in my house. As long as it taste good going in, it doesn’t matter what it looks like. It will all come out the same way ????. You to hard on yourself. I have no baking skills. Your cake LOOOK BEAUTIFUL!
You left the bits you cut off to level the cake??? Those are the cook’s treat, and all the calories leak out of the cut edges so they are sin free! But the cake looked as though it would taste wonderful, often the really beautiful ones taste of very little. That looked like a luxury version of what my family calls chocolate with glop cake. It’s a favourite.