Pumpkin and Spice

When I have some time to kill, I love to visit the blog Cake Wrecks. Have you been? It's side-splitting. If you haven't been, go right now and poke around a bit. Don't worry, it'll open in a new window. I'll wait here... Back? Funny, right? Anyway, the premise of the blog is essentially that people send in photos of professional cakes gone horribly and hilariously wrong.

It's obvious from most (like, 98%) of the pictures that the cakes came from grocery stores. Okay, I live on planet Earth. I've been to a grocery store. I've seen half-heartedly decorated cakes sitting sadly in bakery cases and thought, "Man, oh, man. What jerk made these?" I don't fool myself that those cakes are made by highly experienced pastry chefs.

I hope that you all had a great Mother's Day weekend- I hope you all treated your moms well, showered them with love and gifts and let them know how fab they are. I gave my mom a call, but since she's coming to visit this coming weekend (Yay!) we're postponing our Mother's Day celebrating until then. I'm super-excited about the present I got her, because I know she'll love it, but she reads my blog (hi, Mom!) so I can't say what it is yet!

Kyle's mother lives about three miles away from us, so we did celebrate with her. Of course, I baked her a cake. I decided that I wanted to decorate her cake in an orange color scheme, because I think that Kyle's mom looks beautiful when she wears oranges. (Not many people do, but it's a great color on her.) Since the outside was going to be orange, it made sense to make the cake orange flavored as well.

I'm a big fan of the blog Cake Wrecks. The blog focuses on hilariously hideous professional cakes gone wrong. Ugly decorations, weird airbrushing, strange spelling mistakes... it's all there, and it's all so, so funny. It is everything I (as a professional baker) aspire not to be!

Every Sunday, though, Jen (the bloggeress), runs a feature called "Sweet Sundays". Every Sweet Sunday has a theme, and features beautiful, well-done cakes that reflect that theme. This week's theme was "The Undead Wed"- and the Goth wedding cake I made for my final project in my advanced cakes class was one of the featured cakes!

I'm at the new lodge, now- it's much smaller than the old one. The old lodge was the "base" lodge- where skiers park for the day, where you pick up your ski rentals for the day, and where you buy lift tickets, so it's quite a large lodge. The new one is the highest one up the mountain, and can only be reached (during the day) by skiing in, so there's not the same amount of traffic as the other two lodges.

In the morning, we bake muffins and other breakfast items for the day. There's a little cabin at the top of the mountain that sells hot cocoa, muffins, cookies and other snackie foods. We bake their treats for them, and then have to send them up the mountain to the cabin. How do we get them up the mountain? We pack them in a box, put them on the ski lift, and send them on their way. It's so funny watching that little box full of muffins and cookies riding up on the lift all by themselves. It makes me laugh every morning.

As promised, I made sure I had fresh batteries in my camera at work! I was going to try to backtrack and get pictures of the stuff I did yesterday, but a lot of it had been wrapped/frozen. So, no pictures of the apple brown sugar coffee cake, or the meringue mushrooms. However, a few things I made yesterday became parts of things I made today!

For example, yesterday I baked chocolate chip cookies. Once they were cool, I layered them on sheet trays and froze them. Today, I made those cookies into massive ice cream sandwiches. Freezing the cookies made them firmer, so they didn't break when I sandwiched them together. It also kept everything as cold as possible so the ice cream didn't melt. Even so, I had to work fast, and have several trays going at once- so I could rotate in and out of the freezer as the ice cream softened. Aww, yeah, look at that. I know there's nothing in the picture for scale, but it is a seriously huge sandwich. You can't go wrong- two made from scratch cookies, ice cream with flecks of vanilla beans... Yum.