Nerdette announced a cake contest and I like making cake and so I was excited. And then I realized I like making and eating cakes, I don't really get excited about decorating them.
Now partly this could be that my mother went through a phase of amazing cake decoration. Off the top of my head, I recall a boom box cake, a pizza cake, and a hamburger cake. There were many more. The pizza cake had tiny icing pepperoni. The hamburger cake had icing lettuce peeking out from the bun. So, in my head, decorating a cake is a lot of work. And honestly, I tend to be just as happy with naked cake.
Naked cake is gorgeous but hard to be on theme for much more than naked cake.
So I thought about getting some decorator tips and attempting something, but in the end I decided to just attempt something with powdered sugar.
(It probably didn't hurt that someone had already suited an amazing cake decorated to look like a book cover, and so a standard had already been set high.)
But I like cake. I went with the swirled jam cake from Snacking Cakes, which I love, even though the jam tends to get a bit lost. And I made my own stencil using paper.
I baked the cake. I put together a cinnamon sugar topping. And then I unveiled my stencil and shook on some powdered sugar.
It kinda worked. Like you can tell it was intended to be an N, but the sugar tipped on one edge and it was not as crisp as I had hoped.
And yes the lighting is not great, but I also was not going to wait until the next day when I could just eat some of the cake.
So my dreams of some cute decorations for this cake were not up to par. But there was cake. And cake is good.
