Dramedic Cake Adventures

This is the cake that I wanted to make Jack and Christian for their first Birthday. It's from a Martha Stewart Baby magazine I bought like 9 years ago.

Sailboat Cake- This glossy sea of dreams is made to delight even the most land-locked little boy. Fluffy icing, tinted the gentlest blue, is scalloped into waves around the sides of a chocolate cake that's swimming with fish cookies. A homemade paper sailboat crests the frothy waves of the cake's surface

Caitlin Flanagan hit the nail on the head when she said, "I fall mute and wondering at the pages of Martha Stewart Living."

If grown women had a fairy tale book, it would be Martha Stewart Omnimedia. Suspended in time and space on glossy magazine pages these images whisper of a beautiful world where fluffy icing is scalloped into waves swimming with fish cookies. But reading the instructions is a jolt of cold water into reality. Flanagan continues, "Much of the Stewart enterprise, of course, involves a certain level of fantasy and wish fulfillment, having to do not only with the old dreams of wealth and elegance but also with the new one of time. That many of Stewart's projects are time-consuming is in fact part of their appeal... " These projects always call for something obscure, and when the creations do appear in real life, the response is often along the lines of- why the heck did you spend so much time making that? I once handed these very Marthaesque invitations I had made out to a group of friends, and the first thing that one girl (who I didn't know very well by the way but was trying to be inclusive so she got one too) said was, verbatim, "Wow. You have waaay too much time on your hands."

The joy-killers are right. These projects do take an insane amount of time, especially when one has two sets of twins and the project they have settled on calls for four separate recipes involving a frosting tip and piping bag, blue and white sanding sugar, a candy thermometer, an inverted spatula, cake comb, meringue powder, good quality cocoa, and another set of instructions for an origami paper boat with a bamboo skewer. Honestly.

Flanagan says that people appreciate what MS does but nobody actually does it themselves! Nobody except.. well... dreamy quacks like me. A couple times a year I have to dive into one because I LOVE the magic quality that these time-consumers kick out (if you don't know what I'm talking about, go to Disneyland. Creating that fantastic hyper-reality keeps an army of gardeners/repair people busy. But they, of course, get paid for it.) Not that my kids receiving the cake appreciate it, my husband points out. That's true, and unfortunately our child care responsibilities are so demanding that any project I take on he has to shoulder too. I know they're turning ONE, not three, and they're not going to remember a lick of this. But still... I just have to make a Martha Stewart sailboat cake for them. Something inside of me, that sighing, romantic inner me propels me forward, especially after reading this pitch penned by MS staffers: "take a moment to recall your own childhood birthdays. Ask around and you'll discover that for most people, it is not the guests, the place or even the presents that are remembered, but rather the birthday cake. Made by a grandmother, aunt, or parent, a special cake is well worth the effort... it will foster memories that linger for years..." Wow, super syrupy and probably about as true as a happily ever after ending, but I want to believe that the magic and love of a fancy cake will lift someone. Jack and Christian only have their first birthday ONCE IN THEIR LIFE, and I wanted it to be memorable, even if they couldn't remember it. So as irrational as it was, there's no way anyone could talk me down from the ledge.

First stop is the well-stocked Ralph's supermarket, but unfortunately, I discover that sanding sugar, meringue powder, cake combs and inverted spatulas are not to be found. As I'm searching, Caleb and Julian put the entire contents of the baking aisle inside my cart. Sorry Ralph's worker who had to sort out the huge pile of chocolate pudding, lime jello, organic rice flour and peach cups I stacked on top of the bagged kidney beans as I got the heck out of Dodge.

LA is surprisingly very non-craft friendly, even the Michael's in Santa Monica is pretty lame, although they do have cake combs and frosting supplies. Locating a sanding sugar outlet=an errand for Ian. I've already spent about five times what it would have taken to make a sheet cake and I haven't even turned on my oven. A less tenacious mother of two sets of twins would have called it a day, but unfortunately, I am extremely stubborn.

The next day I made the origami sailboats, and the next day I made the sugar cookie dough, with my two little helpers, and the next day, which was the day before the party, I cut the dough into fish shapes using a paring knife and which TAKES FOREVER!! Dealing with sugar cookies is such a mess because it sticks to every surface, even when I use tons of flour, and the dough keeps tearing around the edges when I try to cut it into shapes. Getting through all the dough really took a long time. I'd like to see these frustration photos in MS.

Flanagan said Stewart presents a vision of domesticity that involves as much make-believe as practicality, that is filled with allure and prettiness rather than the drudgery and exhaustion of which we are all so wary...

She's so right about the vision presentation devoid of drudgery. Cutting the cookies was drudgery, and so was shuttling the cookie sheets around to get them all baked, but frosting them was outright tricky. The royal icing, made of meringue powder, didn't want to adhere itself in straight, clean lines like Martha's fish cookies, but got smeary around the edges, and we can't have that magical look happening if the edges are smeary. Plus, my helpers wanted to be involved, so of course, my patience got tested beyond excruciating as they glopped icing on the table and constantly tried to eat it. Although I have to say, overall, they're very sweet and I am trying to keep the experience fun so I couldn't get too mad. After a few deep breaths I finally realized they were perfect sanded-sugar-sprinklers.


After the kiddos went to bed I got to work on the cake batter. This particular cake is a double layer square, and I didn't have two 8 in. square cake pans, of course, nor thought I would ever need a second square cake pan again in my life, so I opted to bake each layer one at a time. The problem was that I guessed way too low when I filled the first pan and wound up cooking too much in the second. It was very late, and after baking the second pan 40 min. longer than the longest recommended time, it still wasn't done so I slid it back in the oven and lay down. The next thing I knew it was 2am and the smell of something burning had roused Ian from a deep sleep. He rushed to save us all from death, which meant he didn't get up for his marathon-training run, which meant that he had to go in the evening instead, which made us all grumpy... this cake was really getting on everyone's nerves.

Despite the fact that I was way more organized that I usually am, there was so much to do the morning of when I looked at the clock as I pulled out the replacement layer, inexplicably there was only one hour before the party was supposed to start. I made the icing that required the candy thermometer, and it got stiff so fast I didn't have time to use the inverted spatula, so in a frantic scramble I just started throwing icing onto the cake with my bare hands. At one point Caleb came up to me and forgot what he was going to say when he looked at me. My eyes were wild, I had icing smeared all over me and I looked like clawwoman because my hands were three times their normal size.


Somehow I managed to comb the cake and stick on the fish cookies and slap on the sailboats. My icing wasn't quite as pliable as I think it was supposed to be, so it wasn't perfect (aargh!) but it looked pretty good.

It was ten minutes to go time and we still had to set everything up. Ian, who had been picking up balloons and tables all morning was begging me to get outside, but I still had to change out of being clawwoman. I told him that everyone is usually late and there was still time; I can't count how many parties we've done over the years where the first guest shows up 30 min. after start time. Except today. Saturday, August 22 wound up being so jam packed with other events that our first guest got there on the dot and two others arrived within five minutes. Everyone was very helpful though, which was perfect because I was frantically able to get it all assembled. But everyone also had to leave early, and so when cake time rolled around there were only about five people left, which was perfect irony. But it was also very nice because the moment was low key, relaxed, and maybe, just maybe, a little bit magical (despite the fact the fish were trying to take off).


Jack and Christian 'played' with their baby friends, and we also pulled out the parachute. The parents got underneath it in a parachute house for a minute with the kids, whose faces were squiggly with delight.





All in all it was a fun party, and a big thanks to everyone who celebrated Jack and Christian's special day with us. They're one! I never thought we'd make it through this year, but somehow we did with enough energy to spend a week making a cake. I'm still working on finding the balance between putting in a lot of effort into something special and finding magic on the fly. While we cleaned up, Ian told me that the cake looked really great. But later, the next day, he asked me if I could make a sheet cake next year. One last Flanagan quote came to mind:
"The Stewart fantasy encompasses the feminine interest in formal weddings and gracious entertaining, but principally—and more powerfully—it turns on a wistful and almost shameful attraction to ironing boards and newly washed crockery and (crazy-insane cake experiences). And on this wan longing, Stewart has built an empire."
I said I'd think about it. It doesn't hurt to indulge the wan longing once a year, does it?