We Might Have Gotten Carried Away on This One

Ta Da!

This cake was complicated, and I can’t say we were completely successful. But close enough. Despite the fact that at one point I got so frustrated with our dadgum royal icing that I may or may not have thrown a palm leaf across the room.

It may seem like an odd concept for a cake, but we were celebrating three birthdays. The Egyptian pyramid was for my sister-in-law Mari and my Father-in-law Mike, who are both history nuts for this period. Then the USC flag on the top is our nod to sister-in-law Dianna, who is an alumnus and superfan of the USC football team.

We had some major execution problems. For starters, you’d think a simple pyramid would be an easy shape to carve. You’d be wrong. Well, it may be a simple shape, but it turns out that carving a cake is much more complicated than we figured. I kept ending up with one side of the pyramid being thinner than the other because I could not manage to keep my knife straight. Then we tried to frost the cake and those tiny little layers would not hold still. Bear made homemade lemon curd and French Buttercream frosting to use as fillings in between the layers of white cake. It was unbelievably delicious, but even after cramming toothpicks all throughout the cake, nothing would stay put. I finally ended up slightly melting the frosting and pouring it over the top.

Then we tried to put the fondant on, but the point of our pyramid kept slicing right through it. We ended up tossing a layer across it like a saddle, and then doing two separate triangles for the other sides. Removing some of the weight like that helped a little, but by the time we got around to eating it, you can see how the fondant drooped. The bricks started out straight.

And then of course there were those infernal palm trees. I sculpted them out of gum paste, but I let the leaves and the trunk dry separately. Only then did I discover that there was no good way to attach them together. Our royal icing refused to set up, and after throwing a slightly major hissy fit, I gave up and went to bed. When we got to Bear’s folk’s house, we caved and used hot glue.

Still, despite my completely unrealistic standards, I’m more happy than disappointed with how this cake turned out. Bear came up with putting the Nile in there out of sugar, and that was a huge hit. Micah insisted on licking the river like a lollypop and knocked over the palm trees that managed to stay up. And Bear also came up with the brown sugar sand. He’s turning out to be so creative. I think all those years working in Tresa’s Sweatshop he’s managed to pick up a thing or two.