Okay, so I wrote this a few weeks ago now, but it’s nice to step back sometimes and check to make sure you didn’t miss a turn. So here it is, just a little story about how good a little folly, and a bit of cake, can occasionally be.  

It was kind of a lame idea to begin with. Just a joke, really. We had got to talking about Blue’s Clues at work, brought together by memories and the Mail Time song, and I mentioned that my mom had a cake pan featuring the hound. “If I can find, it I’ll sign up to bring cake in for your birthday month, when is it?” I rashly volunteered. And so there I was, in January, knowing that the cake needed to be made now. But I had no idea what to do. I eat cake but I don’t really make it. I prefer cookies and brownies and pudding. Cake, in my mind, is rather like a blank canvas. It can look nice, it can taste nice, but it’s still just the thing people put the actual food on – or in – and I had no idea what kind of cake to make. Worse yet, I had no idea how to pipe it.

I ended up using my Martha Stewart dessert book and modifying the coconut cake recipe to be more coconut-ish. The original assumes there will be plenty of coconut on the outside, but I wanted to make Blue, not a snowball. In the end I put in ground up flakes and added orange peel and orange juice (that is, the juice of the orange I zested).

In other words: I winged it like a mad scientist.

It should have been a disaster. I used the last of my homemade yogurt for the sour cream, and when I poured the batter into the pan and discovered I needed to double the recipe if I didn’t want to end up with a jelly roll, I subbed the rest of the sour cream for coconut milk. I was positive it was too big to cook through in the middle. The bottom started browning, so I covered the narrower half of the cake in tin-foil, my mind full of images of burnt dog. Then when I finally took it out I was convinced it had completely dried out. Not being able to cut a piece off to see was torture. I put the cake in the fridge and went to bed, gloomy and defeated (and, yes,  a little melodramatic).

The next morning brought a few more hitches that really should have put a stop to the whole thing. I used a medley of sugars for the Italian meringue because I was running out of white. It boiled just a bit too long, caramelizing a little and then hardening on contact with the cold egg whites. The beige and brown sugars gave a pleasing, rustic color to the frosting that made me afraid of how it would handle dye. The three frosting tips I have were all too small for this job, so I tapped up two zip-locks instead (a la this extremely useful video). I substituted coconut oil for half of the butter and watched in anxious anticipation as it mixed. There was no way this was going to work.

And yet, somehow, everything came together fine. My blues are too, too close together in shade, and I forgot how truly hideous pink dye taste, but the result is satisfactory. I can’t remember ever liking any of my frosting jobs, but my mom is a master cake decorator and maybe some of her mojo passed through to me via osmosis. Or maybe it was all the magic of meringue buttercream. Even when it seemed to be melting in my hot hands it piped out steady and true (well, except for when unmixed clumps of coconut oil got stuck in the tip. Yum). When I brought the remains of the cake home that night, after it had been siting in the breakroom all day, I was able to wrap it in plastic without the frosting squashing and sticking. It stayed perfect down to the last bite, though texture wise it definitely was (marginally) more pleasant at room temperature than straight from the fridge.

Basically, the cake was a complete dream. A credit to no one.

When I tackled this cake I was in the middle of another long, stressful week at the office. I got a new responsibility in October, and slowly I have started feeling less and less capable of doing my job well. I’m not motivated enough to be a perfectionist, but I have standards and assumptions about my abilities, and it’s depressing to feel oneself continually fall below those. Having this cake turn out, despite my inexperience and my hasty shortcuts, made me feel such a flood of relief that it’s hard to find a word worthy of describing it. It was just the reminder I needed to help rediscover that solid bit of hope which is always there to stand on when things are bleak and uncertain. Faith isn’t expected to be fed by cake, but maybe sometimes that’s what the soul really needs.