The Mary Cake. (May 2001)

I made this cake, as you might guess, for Mary. I hadn't really seen her since my sister's wedding 2 years ago, so we invited her over for dinner. At the last minute, I decided to make a cake for her. She arrived as I was decorating it, and the door bell is so loud that I jerked my arm in fright and totally messed up part of the basketweaving on the side of the cake. But it still tasted good. Since she arrived a little early, she ended up helping me put the flowers on.

The cake itself is marbled yellow and chocolate. I covered it with white buttercream flavored with a almond extract. All the flowers are royal icing. I just used some of the ones I made a while back from my stockpile. The 3 of us ate about a third of the cake for dessert, and I sent the rest home with Mary for her family.

Problems: Two problems, neither one of them very big. I *always* use vanilla, but Greta brought this batch of almond icing to class once that smelled so good that I've been thinking about it for the last 2 weeks, so I used almond this time. I put a tablespoon in for the full pound of icing, and it was just a little overwhelming. So next time I'll cut back a little, maybe to 2 tsp. The other problem was with the design. The top looks a little...motley, but I just wanted some variety of color and texture. I didn't make the flowers especially for the cake, so I just had to make due with what I had. It was still pretty tasty.