Unhappy Feet Cake
So I had baby fever and we tried to make a baby using the traditional methods – tequila, porn, having a massive argument over something we can’t even remember. Meanwhile our friends simply looked at each other and pooped out a few cute and a few not-so-cute babies and one who looked kind of Jewish but his dad sure isn’t. More determined than ever I swiped right on Tinder a few times, winked at the mailman, and popped down to the local glory hole. Finally, we kept up with the Joneses and pooped out one of our own who thankfully looks like me so no one wonders about the paternity anyway. He cried and I realized the gravity of this mistake, but apparently it’s frowned upon to ask your maternity nurse if she might be in the market for some child labor in 3-5 years for the low investment of parenting now, so we bundled him up and brought him home.
Remember when your overly critical parents reminded you of all the things that you did wrong? That’s because everything you did as a baby *was* wrong, because you have the cognitive capacity of a Russet potato but you’re not as versatile. Why the fuck don’t you nap if you’re tired? How are you so devastated because I won’t let you eat the cloth I just wiped your shit-stained butt with? “Cherish this moment!” motherhood blogs blare as some basic bitch sips her PSL and smiles at her perfectly swaddled gremlin in her SNOO. I look around, covered in the body fluids of not only my own spawn but all of our friends’ children as they smear phantom ketchup and sputum over every surface imaginable. We haven’t had grape jelly in three years but it’s on every door handle now. Turns out once you all have kids everyone becomes real close and likes to get together and bitch about said kids. But you’re only allowed to bitch about your own kid and if you suggest that little Johnny looks and sounds like he’s got two toes firmly planted on the spectrum his mom gets a little snippy with you. Well, I might like Johnny more if he just made eye contact once and learned that “purple” is not a texture. Suddenly, in a moment of weakness and contrition, I found myself baking yet another fucking birthday cake for one of these crotch goblins. I may be contrite but I’m also tinged with spite. So I present to you the Unhappy Feet Cake – the outside is penguin, but the inside is bleeding penguin.
Red Velvet Penguin Cake:
Ingredients:
442.5g cake flour
33g cocoa powder
1.5tsp baking soda
0.5tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
172.5g butter
525g sugar
3 large eggs
3/4 cup canola oil
1 bottle red food coloring (1oz) – be better than me and use Wilton gel food coloring and not Clubhouse Red which looks like a weird burgundy purple
3 tsp vanilla
3 tsp vinegar
75ml plain yogurt
400ml milk
Prepare 3 pans - 1 8-inch round cake pan and 2 6-inch round cake pans.
Sift the cake flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt together in a bowl.
In the bowl of a stand mixer, cream butter and sugar together until fluffy.
Add eggs and oil, beat well to incorporate.
Whisk together the vinegar, yogurt, and milk. Add red food coloring and vanilla to the mixture.
In three additions, alternate adding the flour mixture and the milk mixture into the egg and butter mixture, mixing gently in between each addition. Do not overmix!
Divide the cake batter evenly between the three cake pans. Bake at 350 for 25-30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.
Cream Cheese Icing:
Ingredients:
4oz cream cheese
4oz icing sugar
2oz butter
vanilla extract
Memorizing a cream cheese icing recipe is best done in ratios - 1 : 1 : 0.5 of cream cheese : icing sugar : butter.
Beat well, add a splash of vanilla extract. Adjust the consistency of your icing with milk. Taste it - still too buttery/cheesy? Add more icing sugar. Voila. Cream cheese icing.
Then dye it pink like a penguin’s organs.
Buttercream:
In my last post, I bestowed upon you a recipe for Ermine Buttercream. It is delicious. And exactly the opposite of what you need, for Ermine Buttercream has less structure. Alas, we must turn to the clearly-subpar-except-in-this-scenario American Buttercream.
This does not need a recipe. Simply add enough icing sugar to butter until it tastes more like sugar and less like butter, then adjust the consistency with a splash of milk or heavy cream. You want it spreadable. Voila. American Buttercream.
For this cake, I used about 2 cups of butter, and red, yellow, and brown food coloring to make it a nice fleshy color.
Marshmallow Fondant
16oz marshmallows (if you’re smarter than me, you’d use mini marshmallows)
2 tbsp water
2 lbs sifted powdered sugar. SIFTED.
Vegetable shortening for kneading
Food coloring of your choice - in this case we needed yellow and black.
Corn starch for rolling
Look, no one likes wedding cake and they all pick off the fondant. This marshmallow fondant is easier to make at home, tastes like candy, and makes the cake damn cute. Will your guests probably pick it off anyway? Probably. But the cake is damn. cute.
In a large microwave safe bowl, add marshmallows and water. If your whole batch of fondant will be one color, add the food colouring now; otherwise it can be kneaded later into the finished fondant. For this cake, ¾ of the recipe will be black. The rest of the fondant can start off white, then knead yellow food coloring into half of this batch.
Melt marshmallows in the microwave. Stir until smooth, then add the powdered sugar. Stir until a rough ball comes together.
Generously grease hands and work surface with vegetable shortening, then start kneading the fondant until it forms a smooth, elastic ball that does not tear when stretched. This will start off rather hot on the hands so don’t be a pussy and suck it up, you’re ruining someone’s birthday.
When rolling out the finished fondant for covering the cake, first dust your work surface with cornstarch to prevent the fondant from sticking. Roll fondant out to about 2-3mm. Once the cake has been covered, smooth a layer of vegetable shortening over the surface to remove any traces of the cornstarch and to, ahem, moisturize the fondant to prevent cracking.
If you need to make the fondant ahead of time, wrap it very well in plastic wrap and keep at room temperature; microwave for 5-10 seconds before using to soften, and knead briefly before rolling.
Cake Assembly
Stack your cakes in the following order: 8 inch, 6 inch, 6 inch. If your cakes have domed while baking, level off the 8 inch and one of the 6 inch. You can take advantage of the dome of the second 6 inch, which will be your top layer.
Using a sharp serrated knife, carve your cake into a dome that slightly flares out at the bottom.
Between each cake layer, pipe a buttercream border around each layer, then fill the center with cream cheese icing. Repeat until each layer is stacked.
Crumb coat the entire dome, then let chill in the fridge until the icing hardens, about 30 minutes.
Add one additional coat of buttercream onto the cake, taking care to smooth it into the most phallic shape you can think of. This penguin is a girthy boy. Let chill again for 30 minutes in the fridge.
Set aside a golf-ball sized piece of black fondant, and roll the rest out into a large circle that can cover the entire cake. Transfer the fondant over the top of the cake by draping it over your rolling pin, then slowly smooth the fondant over the entire cake. You may need to cut some slits at the bottom to eliminate any overlapping pieces of fondant. To smooth the seams back together, wet your finger and rub the seam until it disappears.
Roll out the white fondant and cut using a sharp knife or razor blade into…the shape of a penguin’s face and belly (just look at the damn picture). To adhere layers of fondant together, simply wet the back of the piece you’d want to adhere and stick.
Decorate the rest of your penguin as you wish, Mr. Potato-Head style.
To serve, realize that a toddler does not understand cakes come in penguin form, and will cry through her birthday song until you viciously cut into the cake and shove some in her mouth to shut her up and convince her that it is truly a cake.
