3.09.2009

Before and After

This weekend I made a delicious coconut cake for a fancy-schmancy dinner party. Based on a Paul Prudhomme classic, this cake is a pain in the frickin' ass to make. Four components: butter cake, coconut cream filling, glazing syrup, and cream cheese frosting. But it's good (all four sticks of butter worth of good). It turned out, as you can see from photo below.


Before continuing, I should remind you that Eric left me. For a week in Alaska. Why is this relevant? Because I had to go to the dinner party by myself, which meant that I had to both drive and hold the cake. Really, I couldn't do both, so I just drove, that seeming like the less optional task. Wrong, as you can see from photo below.


I wish I had taken a photo of after After, because I managed to restore it quite well (Helpful hint: always pipe big rosettes of frosting on top of your cake. You can use the globs as mortar post-disaster). And I was sure to serve it from the kitchen, so everyone just saw lovely slices of cake. I passed around the iPhone so they could see how the dessert would have looked in more ideal circumstances.

3 comments:

deb said...

This was a staggeringly good cake.

I'm sorry you didn't all get a taste. You'll just have to take my word for it.

Stephanie said...

If you ever move to Paris, you should never-ever promise to bring 2 pies to your friends' Thanksgiving celebration, especially when you have absolutely no kind of pie or cake carrier whatsoever, or even any boxes big enough to hold pies. And when you live alone.

I finally managed to jury-rig a kind of 2-story pie-carrying system involving a tray and a raised rack. The worst part was carrying this whole contraption out the front door of my apartment, then out the two front doors of my apartment building, then across the courtyard and through the front gate of the apartment complex, to the street where the taxi was waiting (the metro was NOT an option that day!). Then I called my friends from the taxi and told them to meet me in front of their building: "I have pies, and I won't be able to get them inside on my own!"

After that, I only ever brought one pie for Thanksgiving, and I'm sure it wasn't as good as your cake.

Unknown said...

Mein Gott! Were you driving over giant boulders in the Volvo? Whole or broken, it looks delish!