the tragic tale of steak...and other stuff while i'm at it

Ok dudes, I made the steak-shaped cake on saturday. I was trying to decide what kind of cake to make it, and I decided on a white cake. I hadn't perfected a white cake recipe yet, so I called my sister because she had made one recently in the shape of a toilet for her boss (she cleans stuff for the summer..toilets among them) and she had used a white cake recipe. Anyways, she said it was the best white cake she'd ever tasted, so I hunted down the same recipe she used and made it for the steak. It was great. Perfect. Awesome.

So next I made the frosting, which was just a basic white frosting. Then I had to dye it red, which, unless you are a baker or pastry chef like me, you have no idea how hard it is to dye a frosting red. You have to practically dump a hole thing of red dye into it before it turns remotely close to red and not pink. And if you don't get the right kind of red dye, it'll leave a bitter taste to the frosting after awhile. Naturally I didn't have the right kind of dye and after stirring in all the red dye in my house I could find, it still wasn't the right color. Soooooooooooo I added a teeeeeny tiny itsy bit of black dye to it, to help darken the color. I'd read somewhere that black helps. It didn't. It looked more purpley-red-bloody than anything. Bloody would have been ok, since it was for a steak, but the purpley-ness threw it off. So my last option was to let it sit in the fridge because supposedly that will darken the red color as well. I came back an hour or so later and surprisingly the color was dead-on. Just like raw meat! It was great. Perfect. Awesome.

So yeah, I cut the cake out to a steak shape and frosted it up. I started laughing as I frosted because it looked so hilarious. If you kind of stood at a distance and blurred your vision, it actually looked like a giant slab of raw meat. To finish it off, I stuck a butcher knife in it to make it more comical. I showed my mom and the look on her face was priceless. She looked so disgusted, it was awesome. I took some pics, and set it out for everyone to gaze at it's beauty until after dinner. It tasted great too. Definitely the best white cake I've made so far. The whole thing was great. Perfect! Awesomeeeee!

But then...!

I happened into my kitchen later that night just before going to bed, and I discovered in horror that our dog had gotten on the table and eaten 90% of the cake that was left. I was shocked. Disgusted. Horrified. Anguished. Sorrowed. Angered. And uh...everything else you could possibly imagine me feeling at this point. You can only imagine how horrible of an experience it was. It was like a painter having his masterpiece ripped to shreds by some crazed maniac! It was like a gardener discovering a gopher had eaten all its pansies! It was like a weatherman getting fired just when a big storm was blowing in! It was like Donald Trump losing hundreds of thousands of dollars to a crook in a business deal! It was like a weightlifter discovering a psychopath had melted his bar down and crushed his weights with a bulldozer! It was like an ice cream shop vendor messing up on her typing skills and having the words ice cream form a whole new meaning to be used by her friends in ways to make fun of her and have a secret meaning behind such an innocent thing as ice cream!

I couldn't sleep at all that night. And when I did I had nightmares that everyone I knew turned emo. *shudders*

And so ends the tragic tale of the steak cake. Maybe at some point I'll attempt to make another, or perhaps one shaped like a chicken instead. Maybe.

Now I'm on to greener pastures. I decided tonight I'm going to write a muffin recipe. I wasn't inspired by anything. I didn't see or read anything to make me want to do this. I just am going to. I'll finish the recipe tonight and if I don't bake them tonight I'll do it tomorrow and write again soon, so you can all be tortured by seeing the pics of my creations and reading about them. That's my favorite part!

Auf weidesehen!
~lacey

"The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of mankind than the discovery of a star"
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin