Decorating a Cake in a Heat Wave in Seattle

Thursday night was Cake Night at the Barnes & Noble in Downtown Bellevue! Well, actually it was the roll-out for two new books in the Day Hikes series from Sasquatch Press: The Columbia Gorge by Seabury Blair Jr. and The Central Cascades by Mike McQuaide. (Seabury was my soon-to-be-ex Jeanne's first husband - try explaining THAT one simply to people!) Anyway, I did a similar cake for Seabury's first book (Backcountry Ski Washington) many years ago when I was first dating Jeanne over on Bainbridge Island. So the Community Relations Manager from Barnes & Noble thought it might be a fun idea to have a cake for their book release party.

A lot of you know that my daughter, Nikki, has been a decorator for Whole Foods as a bakery decorator over the past year. Nikki's worked on a wide range of cakes and cookies now so I asked her to prepare a sheet cake for the party. Here it is pre-decorating: chocolate with mousse and raspberry layers inside, covered with a surprisingly light cream icing. She added the beautiful edging before transporting it home during her lunch hour as we started into Seattle's first serious heat wave. The cake was so big, it barely squeezed into a shelf in our fridge for chilling while we prepped all the icings and coloring. (You can click on any picture to see a larger image.)

 

Here's Nikki touching up the crack in the cake I caused by putting one end up on the lip of the shelf to fit that sucker into the fridge -- good work, Nikki! (Bet you didn't know THAT, guys!)

Here I've started to airbrush in the two covers with food coloring that was thinned down for spraying. Unfortunately, it was only then tat we realized that my water-based colors wouldn't absorb into the sugary, cold frosting (oops). So quick: Plan B. Wait a minute -- What the hell was Plan B, anyway? (We wing it!)

Nikki quickly mixing food coloring with white icing and I'm squeezing it out over the airbrushed colors (that AREN'T drying!), literally painting the covers on to the frosting instead. Whew!

And here we are with the finished cake. Once we put the titles and other lettering on the cake, everything pulled together despite the last-minute panic (bet hey -- they'll never know until this blog post goes up!)

And here I am in the store -- on time! -- with Seabury and Mike and the cake.

Some of the folks at the book party: Ron Holden (gourmande extraordinaire), Lauren Silverberg (publicist from Sasquatch Books), Seabury Blair, Peter Melvoin (goof-off from Bellevue Community College) and Brenda Gurung (B&N Community Relations Manager)

Here's a happy Jeanne with two of her ex's --  proving once again you can never have enough friends!