Zelda Cake of Awesomeness

As many of you may or may not know, I LOVE making cakes. I do. I can't help it. It's like playing with play dough that you get to EAT. It's awesome.

Mike's favorite video game is The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past.

(Pause for dramatic effect and for the man to stop wanting to kill me for blogging that).

When I was in elementary school, Nintendo decided to blow the roof off the video game industry and change the face of home entertainment forever (IMHO). In 1992, when Link to the Past was released, I was living in the seat of Nintendo geekdom: Japan. We were not allowed to get a Nintendo. Not when they came out when I was in the 3rd or 4th grade, not after I moved to Japan in 1990. I hold my mother responsible for my awkward social engagements later on in life when I desperately tried to get OUT of playing video games in a group setting - if you didn't play as a kid, there is no way you could keep up by the time I was in College. So. Thanks for that mom. But here I go off on a tangent.

Mike had a birthday a few weeks ago and all I wanted to do was make him a really cool Zelda cake. I schlepped all the supplies over here to his and everything. And then I succumbed to the sickness. It sucked, and to make matters worse I couldn't make the cake.

This past week, I decided that I was feeling better and that since I was coming out here this weekend, I'd surprise him with a cool Zelda cake. I had asked a bunch of my friends for input on the Link to the Past specifics, and I send out a big THANK YOU! to them.

Not bad for an Airstream creation, methinks.

He liked it. Or at least he had the decency to lie and say he did. (Also important)

I could literally sit and watch the mixer spin for hours.

I have major issues with Valentine's Day (usually I'm single and not happy about it), and so I decided to make this cake do double duty as a Valentine's Day cake as well as a belated birthday cake.

Nice crumb on this one.

We ignore the bumps as the buttercream and I had been fighting.

Many a food coloring was harmed in the making of this cake.

I really felt that it needed a lake. Especially since my dog's name is Zora

And it HAD to have a treasure chest, no?

Shrubbery and texture detail. I had 2 kinds of cobblestone and brick on this puppy.

The topper. In all of it's "doofy" tree glory.

Almost done... just needs the tree and shields on top.

Crystals, Super Bomb, Zora flipper

Bow and Arrow, Crystals

Pegasus Boot, Boomerang, ubiquitous Crystals

Heart Piece. Yet another goddamn Crystal.

Recovery Heart, Crystal (ugh), Fire Rod

Fire Rod, Crystal (how many of those ARE there?!?!), Super Bomb

Finished cake with super wiggles waiting patiently to tear into it.

Weekend Update

Holy shnikey. This weekend has been such an EVENT.

The real reason for going to Washington DC? The Rally To Restore Sanity and or Fear. In a nutshell, a cry for reasonableness and moderation in politics and political expectations today. Outside of said nutshell, a whole hell of a lot more people than Comedy Central expected, a whole hell of a lot more people than I expected, and a whole hell of a lot of people acting...well...reasonably. Some of my friends got a bit squished among the masses, but all in all I didn't see anyone acting aggro or uptight or anything other than polite and genuinely happy to be where they were. Which is exactly what you would hope for from a rally purporting to restore sanity. (which it did).

Teabags take Washington


Entertain the masses.

What happened that was more than I expected?

I'm so glad you asked.

My mind was blown in the BEGINNING of this extravaganza. Jon Stewart brought out Cat Stevens (billed again as Yusef. Getting confusing here dude) to play 'Peace Train'. Stephen Colbert became possibly the first person in history to interrupt Yusef (or Joe, if I may) to bring out Ozzy Osbourne to play 'Crazy Train'. The two of them had a sing off. Not even kidding. They hugged and left the stage.

The magnitude of this event is not sinking in, oh lone reader (hi mom!). Cat Stevens hugged Ozzy Osbourne on stage AND I WAS THERE TO SEE IT.

After that, the musical guests just paled in comparison and the grin never left my face.

Little do they know headstands occurred on the other side just the night before....


Yup.


Say it with me "iconic"


Glorious fall, how I missed you!


Duck butt!


These were damn good. Go here.

Another excuse to go to Washington? To see my best friends from CA. Two of them were at the rally with me dressed as teabags, and I got to go sightseeing for a whole afternoon in the glorious fall sunshine with the third. There were headstands on the lawn (pictures of this DO exist, but not on my camera, so I leave it up to your imagination), glorious cupcakes (thanks to a great suggestion by a great friend I FINALLY got to meet in person!), hot tubbing and general debauchery. A great weekend.

Inspiration

Inspiration comes in many many forms, it seems. I LOVE making cakes, and every year I make a cake for my good friend. The thing is, she is an AMAZING cake decorator, and on top of running the local bakery, she does custom cakes as well. It seems that I am the only one with either 1) big enough balls, or 2) enough stupidity to attempt to do one for her. Yeah. Intimidating.

Anyway - every year she makes me one, too, as we both have our birthdays in August. Since I'm leaving town at the end of the month and have a lot on my plate on that score, we scrapped the 'surprise' element and actually talked about what kind of cakes we both wanted. She told me she wanted a cake inspired by Wayne Thiebaud. After looking through a bunch of images online of his, I am overly inspired. There are literally 10 cake ideas in my head. Unfortunately I'm short on time (due to being sick the past couple of days), and I'm not a good painter. Last year I had an amazing artist friend help with sculpting the cake topper, and she's an amazing painter as well, but as she lives in Watsonville now I'm on my own. Eep.

For those of you who don't know or don't remember last year's cake, here it is:

And a close up of the details:

Name of cake: The Dead Chick Cake (she got bitten by a vampire, you see.....)

I think for this year's cake I'm gonna narrow it down to my favorite 2 ideas and do them simultaneously. She'll get whichever one comes out better. Stay tuned!

Time Suckage

I have been busy. Mostly with recovering from getting my wisdom teeth pulled. Wow. That sucked. Still swishing gaping holes in my jaw, but now able to keep food down. Just to sum up.

Post wisdom teeth pullage - I had a BF birthday to deal with. So I baked a cake. A chocolate cake with pear filling glazed with chocolate ganache, and with milk and white chocolate decorations. I ground up pecans and substituted some of the flour. The filling was so volumous the two layers wouldn't meet, and I couldn't glaze over the gap. In a nutshell, if decadence wanted to indulge, this would be its cake.

I made the decoration on top by scanning a tile that Craig has of his family's crest. I cropped out the lion, enlarged it, printed it out, put a piece of parchment paper on top of it and traced it out. I hate white chocolate, and so I'm extremely happy to be using some of the 3lbs I had in my cabinet (even if I did only use 4 oz...).
OK - so the letters are freehand. I couldn't trace through chocolate.

And somehow as I couldn't find my round cake pans, and octagon seemed yummier than a square...