The blog post that almost wasn't...

Go on vacation, they said. It'll be fun, they said...and then you have to adjust back to real life...no one said. I don't know if it is just me, but I have the hardest time getting back to normal life after spending a long weekend away. This may be because I have to return home to a place that smells like cow poo most days of the week, is full of morons, and is ugly as sin. I'm sensing there may be some sort of correlation between the two. Also, my computer decided to delete half of the pictures I took while assembling my cakes this past week, and I had a mild meltdown and almost didn't blog. Right now I'm eating my feelings with delicious cake remnants from the past weekend which allowed me to pick myself up from self-shaming central and write:

That's right, TWO cakes.

I made both these tiny little cuties the day before I left for ABQ/Santa Fe to take my mom on a tour of the actual land of enchantment section of New Mexico (they really should've visited the entire state before settling on that motto). While the sum total to construct these two cakes was over six hours, it was totally worth it. Both cakes were from a batch of triple chocolate fudge cake. Triple. Chocolate. Fudge. Why three times the fudgyness, you ask? Because the only person in the world who loves chocolate more than me is my mom.

Thankfully you can't tell how much we love chocolate due to our deceptively small waistlines.

I wanted her to get the full Kate Bakes Cakes experience, so everything was from scratch. That homemade chocolate frosting was a huge pain in the ass to make, but so tasty. I've told you how powder-filled-coked-out my kitchen gets when making white icing from scratch, but this time...well, there was cocoa powder everywhere. Things were coated in brown. To anyone living in Clovis, you'd just assume I hadn't dusted my house in a week. To everyone else, it looked like I was baking in a house with a dirt floor. End results:

HA- this one really doesn't look like poo!

The icing was super stiff, so my rosettes looked like cardboard, but trust me when I say they didn't taste like it. Even the pearls were edible! My other cake may fill you with a sense of deja vu. This is because I used the leftover frosting from last blog's birthday cake, and the royal icing flowers I made like 18 years ago. Man, those suckers last FOREVER. Still had that wonderful melt-on-your-tongue tastiness I so wish Catholic Communion wafers had. Note to self- copyright that idea and change the face of Catholicism.

Oh, and also, sprinkles...cause, well, you know.

This was my first time attempting to stack cakes of different-sized layers. I'd show you what that process looks like step-by-step if my computer wasn't a jerk of Kanye West proportions today. We'll just take a tour of the abbreviated version instead. I wanted to make sure my tops were completely flat (but just the cakes', not my tops), so I tried a new little trick involving a coaster and a bread knife.

Step one: You put the awkwardly elderly-styled Floridian home deco piece coaster into the cake pan.
Step two: Try to remember if you were drunk when you bought coasters better fitting of Blanche Deveraux's house.
Step three: High five yourself for awesome Golden Girl's reference.

Step five: Remember, you're blogging about cakes here.
Step six: Put the cake back in the pan on top of the coaster.
Step seven: Slowly saw across the top of the cake to remove any unevenness.

There's an optional eighth step here where you remove the trimmed pieces and shove them directly into your mouth because you have zero self control and chocolate cake bits makes a perfectly balanced lunch for a grown ass woman. You do you,  honey. Either way, this trick will leave you with a perfectly leveled cake. Since these cakes were so small, my garote wire cake leveler seemed like overkill. While I am usually a fan of overkill, something about that bread knife just spoke to me. Oh, I guess we're back to those red flags again. After crumb coating, chilling for 30 minutes, and then the smoothed frosting layer on both cakes, some assembly was required:

Bamboo skewers are not easy to cut down, by the way.

I put four cut skewers into each cake to hold the top layer in place while transporting cakes on a three and a half hour drive to Albuquerque. Something, something, my car goes vroom vroom really fast, something, something, preserving the beauty of the cakes. The cakes made it just fine and dandy, thankyouverymuch. However, since we almost completely devoured the chocolate cake, I was really weirded out by the fact that you can obviously SEE four skewers for that cake in the above photo, but we could only find three...yeaaaah. I am totally an overzealous eater, so there's a chance it is inside my person right now. I guess I am no better than those morons I mentioned earlier...but at least I know how to read. So at the end of the day, I'll take whatever small victory I can get. Til next time, my fellow eaters!