Celebrating a Milestone with a Cake Wreck

This week, my blog got its 6,000th page view. This is a totally awesome feat considering the humorless garbage I post on here. Of course, the bulk of the people are looking for wedding cakes with butterflies on them, but that's besides the point. Hopefully, those folks are sticking around long enough to read other content and enjoying it enough to visit more often than once. You never know, or can guess, what brings a person to the site unless you directly ask them...and they actually respond.

I'm rambling...let's get our ugly cake on.

A few of you from the beginning probably remember the incident of the exploded Banana Cake Bomb. If not, refresh your memory. The main reason this cake went so horribly wrong the first time was because I used a pan that was WAY too small for the batter. Only after I had coated the inside of my in-law's new convection oven did I read the fine print that said, "Requires a over-sized pan." Armed with this knowledge, (and some over-ripe bananas) I thought it was time for a banana cake redo. And as we've learned, kids, knowing is half the battle.


See, told you so.

 If you haven't noticed, we tend to buy a lot of bananas with the best intentions of eating them. Only later we find the forgotten fruit causing a serious gnat infestation in our fridge a few weeks days later. When looking back over the history of the blog, it is sad how many times I have had to find an emergency preparation method for bananas. Just do a search for the "banana" at the top and you will find a good deal of the posts. The sad thing is, I really do love bananas, I'm just really bad at choosing a healthy snack over Rock-o-licious Peanut Butter Cups. I mean, who would choose a banana over awesome-tastic candy? But I really DO love bananas. See, I had this awesome sushi the other night that had bananas in it.

Dragon-Naner Sushi. om nom!

So, instead of making banana cake or pudding, I went for the cake. I had intended to make a cake when the blog hit 5,000 page views, but I procrastinated. Shame on me. This was probably a jinxed cake from the start. Kind of a, "have you learned nothing about procrastinating" warning message. I mean really, who bakes a cake at a weird, random 6 number anyway? Well, I do. Therefore, we have a wreck.

I started by trying to avoid coating my horrible stove with banana napalm by halving the recipe. My thighs have no need for an over-sized cake anyway. The baking was uneventful, thank God, and I had 2 beautiful rounds of cake resting on my stove. They needed to cool before being iced with cream cheese, so what did I do? What any red-blooded American would: went out for a sushi dinner, ran full speed into Spec's Liquor at 8:56 p.m. and slid my bottle of Jack Daniels over the check-out scanner before the 9 p.m. close like I was stealing home plate, drove home, drank profusely, and passed out watching Iron Chef: Battle Cabbage. What? Isn't that what you do on any given Saturday night?

I woke up the next morning, went to the kitchen to make breakfast, and noticed my two cakes still sitting on the stove top. Hmmm....guess they're cool enough to ice now! Well, the napalm-like material of the bananas thwarted my ability to get them out of the pan in a single piece. They crumbled, stuck, and generally made a huge mess of my counter top. I whipped up some cream cheese icing and started spreading icing on the first layer. Obviously, the icing was too cold as it pulled tons of little crumbs up when I spread the icing. *sigh* Icing a cake when you are hungover does not usually end well. Long story short, I ran out of icing and was too lazy tired to make any more. So here it is America, my "Woo! I've got 6,000 hits on My Blog" banana cake wreck.

Ummm...nom?

Back from the dead (or from the Wedding)

Hello sad sad readers who enjoy posts of kitchen mayhem. I am back from the brink of wedding insanity. I'm a little thinner (20 lbs to be exact!), and a little (read  A LOT) worse for wear. I am now also Mrs. V. If you know the story of why this blog was started, please know that all has come to pass according to luck and divine mercy/intervention. No, I have not learned to make the world's most divine Czech Kolache, but I have gotten kudos from Jon for a "solid B effort". (Which I just discovered was posted exactly 1 year earlier than our wedding date). And because J has such low low standards, he has settled and taken me for his wife. On a side note, the "Solid B Effort Kolache" and other Kolache tales made it into the Matron of Honor's speech. Ha!

Now let's get down to business.

The wedding cake was not as tasty, nor did it turn out exactly as I hoped. It was still more delicious than any other wedding cake I have ever tasted and was beautiful enough to fool the masses. Even the staff at the cake place were eager to see how it came out. Here is you some food porn:

Me to Cake Place: "Like Martha Stewart's version but with white birds and turquoise wind blowing the flock up the side of the cake



Somehow the birds are now flat to the cake. Not much flying.

Thanks to some very generous friends and family, I have a pretty awesomely stocked kitchen. I was lucky enough to get an awesome stand mixer, bread machine, gourmet cooking pots, and Wustof knives from Williams Sonoma. I got drawers full of misc. gadgets to play with. Much cooking-related joy abounds.

On the other hand, my kitchen, though large for an apartment, is rather ghetto. I know that the electric stove works, but the oven is another story. I have yet to bake anything in it since coming home from the honeymoon. My dishwasher is crap, it is literally being held together with trash bag twist ties right now (ties implemented by the previous tenant I might add). The top shelf threatens to fall any moment. I know I should have the landlord come do something about it, but I just can't handle one more thing on my "to-do" list.

Tonight starts the official "We are saving money by cooking at home" post-wedding challenge. The goal: Pay off 3 loans (student, car, wedding/honeymoon) in 1 year. I am to cook 5 days a week, Jonathan is to cover 1. He has agreed to do the bulk of other chores to even the work load. We wasted a lot of food pre-wedding during our "courtship" time or what not, so we have decided that each week we sit down and plan the following week's menu and shop for those ingredients only instead of having random supplies. This week was $60. I know that is a lot for a week's worth of groceries, but we had to buy a lot of staples (ketchup, mustard, toothpaste, toiletries) because we have been out of the country 3 weeks, and we used/did without all of this stuff pre-wedding so it wouldn't spoil while we were gone. So we now have milk, bread, eggs, flour, meat, and a variety of veggies.

I have started recording the Food Network's "America's Worst Cooks" and am watching and trying to learn as much as possible. I thought I was bad until I've seen some of these folks. I'm thinking about applying to be on the show nonetheless. We'll see how that goes. Williams Sonoma also has cooking technique classes for free throughout the month, so I am thinking about crashing some of those as well.

Until then, may your meals fill your belly without leveling your kitchen. Here are some wedding and food related escapades from our honeymoon in New Zealand. More to come later. Enjoy.


Mr. and Mrs. Jon V



Nom noms left for us at our honeymoon suite!



Ribs!!!

Tui Beer and Apple Cider

Cakes Actually Worth Eating...

Now that wedding planning is in full swing, things are moving a long at a haphazard pace. Recently, Jon and I went to a cake tasting. In my mind, wedding cakes were more there for looks, not for the taste. Kind of a "last resort" if the guests hated everything about the meal, party, and overall felt resentful about the fact that they had to listen to someone's drunken cousin, Shelia, boohoo through a crappy "poem" that she had written for the occasion.

Please excuse my preconceived notions, but I thought wedding cakes were either some derivative of white or chocolate. Sometimes an odd flavor that no one really eats (like pistachio) sneaks into the mix because some bonehead couple ordered it because they wanted their wedding to be "unique". Bad move. Nothing like $1500 worth of cake sitting on the table because it is green, and tastes like sweet-nutty insulation.

Wedding cakes, in my mind, are overly sweet with a nasty after-taste. To me it is almost alcoholly, if that is even a word. If it is not the alcoholly taste, it's aspartame. The "better" of the cakes I have had throughout the many weddings I have been dragged to have lacked the after taste, but had the texture of sugared insulation. I had never met a wedding cake that I just thought was worth the hefty price of anything that has the word "wedding" in front of it. Any cake that did taste great did not look like a wedding cake.

Here drags in Jon's mother, who SWEARS she had the best wedding cake ever and that we should have one like his parents had. However, his parents really didn't have a wedding cake. They had 12 different flavored, regular cakes on cake stands connected with those atrocious bridges that you see in the all the weddings in the 1970's. The thing took up an 8 foot folding table. It was an eye sore with tulle and kinds of gaudy fluff. I am sure my future child's spouse will feel the same way about my wedding cake (because it will be an actual wedding cake, not 12 different flavored cakes with white icing posing a wedding cake). However, that is yet to be know. That being said, Jon's mom gets a big FAIL on the true wedding cake rating system.

So you might have noticed, despite my attempts to edit and correct, that there are some tense shifts in my writing in some places. Try as I might there will be at least one that sneaks in. This is because what you read above refers to how I previously felt. I now feel different. Here's why:

We went to a tasting at a place call Cakes By Gina. The only reason I had given her cakes a second glance is because I found a similar image of the one below with white and monarch butterflies that I fell in love with, and Gina had something similar that I thought could be adapted. You see, thinking that flavor was out, I was going for at least beautiful.

Martha Stewart's Over the Top Version

(Is there even a cake under there?)

Similar to Gina's verison

I was torn about the butterflies though. You see, we are getting married in December. Not many butterflies in the winter, and they really wouldn't really jive with that winter wonderland theme we were trying to work. Maybe snowflakes instead. But then I thought about it, and finally settled on birds. Jonathan and I are both outdoorsy. So instead of the cascade of butterflies, a flock of birds.

Again with the digressions, sheesh. So anyway, we get there and learn that Gina does torte-style cakes. I did not realize what that meant. Apparently, it means that there is a layer of cake, a layer of flavoring of some kind, followed by more cake, then icing. Sounded cool. So we order a few flavors and a few of the filling options. I take a bite...

The cake was the best cake I have EVER tasted. Light, moist, not overly sweet. Turns out Gina uses something like 30% less sugar than a traditional recipe calls for so that the actual flavor of the cake comes out. Fancy that. The first bite was traditional white with a vanilla butter cream. Decadent, delicious. Not to be outdone...except by the chocolate cake with the chocolate butter cream filling. I'm drooling just thinking about it. I think we tried 6 different cakes and 4 different fillings.

Then I got depressed. You see, we aren't having a groom's cake because Jon is having his relatives each bake some traditional culturally-relevant dessert, including, but not limited to the elusive kolache. Therefore, I thought we were going to be stuck with one flavor and have to duke it out. You see, Jon is an over-opinionated groom who actually has ideas about what he wants. This has already caused havoc in other departments, but again, I digress. Then I was informed of the following: Gina allows you to have each tier a different flavor at no additional charge. Wha What?! So, here's how it is going down.

Jonathan and Andrea Vacek's Wedding Cake

Shape: Round

Color: White with aqua swirling "damask-like" scroll pattern.

Number of tiers: 6
Theme: Flock of 2D birds similar to this flying in a flock up the side as if on the aqua wind.

Icing: Butter cream with gum paste birds

Flavors!: (Starting from the bottom tier up)

Tier 1: Traditional Bridal white with a vanilla butter cream filling

Tier 2: Chocolate with a chocolate butter cream filling

Tier 3 (Quintessential Jon and Andrea): Chocolate cake with a peanut butter, butter cream filling

Tier 4: Italian Cream Cake with a Cream Cheese filling

Tier 5: Traditional Bridal White with a Bavarian Cream filling.

I may have to stop back by Gina's place to have another tasting just to "make sure" I made the right choice. LOL. Here is a picture of how it eventually turned out.

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