Soil Horizons Cake for Earth Day

How better to celebrate Earth Day than with a soil cake? We didn’t just want a boring chocolate “dirt cake” with gummi worms in it; we wanted a proper soil profile with the different horizons represented (see the printout at the bottom of the photo below). In the end we discarded some of our more fanciful ideas and went with a relatively design involving 3 layers plus toppings. Here are the components prior to assembly:

For the bottom layer (E horizon) we wanted “rocks” of different sizes so used the health food store equivalent of cocoa rice crispies and cocoa pebbles in a vegan marshmallow base (basically heterogeneous vegan rice crispie treats), shown at left in the photo above.

On top of that we wanted sort of a tan cake for the leached B horizon, so after considering mocha or spice cake we kept it simple and went with a vegan vanilla cake recipe and just added 1.5 Tbsp of cocoa powder. The cake recipe was terrible though, so this layer came out fairly dry, and next time I’d use a tried and true vanilla recipe before mixing in a bit of cocoa. We put basic powdered sugar icing (with a bit of cocoa to match the color) above and below this layer to help bind it to the other layers (top cake in photo above).

The top layer was a mocha cake (the bottom cake in photo above), lighter than a pure chocolate cake but still a nice rich brown for the A horizon. Then we put a mocha ganache on top of that to hold the oreo crumble on top (we used oreo thins with chocolate filling), and topped with a few sugar cookie “leaves.” We also planned to have pretzel stick “twigs” but the dog got into the bag of pretzels the night before so had to give up on that.

Here’s how it looked once assembled:

Once it was assembled we cooled it in the fridge before cutting the edges flush for a neater look:


Here's an oblique shot from above:


Sadly the time in the fridge dried out the cake a bit, so we had to serve it with vegan Breyer’s cookies and cream, and poured some of the new vegan Bailey’s Irish cream on the cake as well.  But that's not an awful worst case. We had some of the leftovers in glasses as a trifle and it worked pretty well.

We also wanted to make roots / mycorrhizae out of white cotton candy which we could jam into the cake, but couldn’t find it. But a simpler idea would have been to bend up a hangar into a jagged shape, poke several sinuous holes in the cake from above, and fill each with thin white icing, so that when you cut into it you can see the roots. Next time!

Making an "Alien" themed chestburster cake

Our friend Riley who hosted the epic Jurassic Park-ty for his birthday last year decided to go with a theme from the movie Alien this year. The obvious response was to make a torso cake with the "chestburster" phase of the alien actually bursting from the cake. Here's how that went down. The basic ingredients were 1 cake, black cherry juice, pectin, and official Alien chestburster chopsticks (in lieu of making a homemade one out of flour / water / salt).

Step 1 was to prepare by making the "guts." We were already using pectin and black cherry juice to make alien-head gummies using a mold (the second photo has some with pineapple-cherry juice for better flavor), with the all-cherry ones in particular looking and feeling super creepy like a blood clot or engorged leeches:

so the ones that didn't come out right were just mixed up into chunky blood-red guts.

Note: if making gummies in the microwave in tiny batches because you only have one stupid tiny mold, be sure to watch the juice carefully to prevent this:


Step 2 was to make an ordinary carrot cake. We put it on top of a large cardboard box with plastic wrap on top, and a hole cut for the chopstick. We scooped out a shallow divot to make room for some guts. We also adjusted the alien chopstick to the right "resting" height before emerging (you can see the white tip peeking out) so that we could secure it in the box properly:


Step 3: we don't just need the alien head to be just below the cake surface before emergence, we also need it to go to just the right height when it's pushed up so that you see the whole thing but not the boring chopstick part. That's what the sideways chopstick is for, to set the emergent height. The plastic eyedropper full of cherry juice was also carefully aligned so that the nozzle tip is at the cake surface but not high enough to be visible when the alien bursts out. In initial tests the juice shot up about 3 feet, so I played around with plain water to figure out how much pressure to use to get a good spurt without making a huge mess.

Step 4: Ice it up (we used gross icing from the store to save time), and add a plastic-wrapped printout of John Hurt's head to provide a clue as to what's going on here.


Here's the cake on the box (sides of arms un-iced b/c we didn't have enough) and my hands in the box ready to go, just waiting for Sarah to hit play on my cell phone to start the audio file from the actual scene in the movie with the alien bursting out and screeching"

And here's what it looked like after emerging. Sadly our video footage of the event didn't take when Sarah's phone froze up. Also, you can see that there is some cherry juice speckled all over the cake, but unfortunately when the cake was being moved the nozzle tip ended up pressing into the chopstick base such that it was just a gentle spitting rather than a real eruption of fake blood. Also, the extra guts below the alien were applied after emergence when we realized that most of the guts below the icing were invisible. Alas.




Despite the minor problems, it was still a lot of fun! Sarah and I went for free costumes by printing out alien facehuggers and taping twisties to the legs so that they would grip our faces and hang onto our glasses:


Most costumes were more impressive, especially the adult alien and power loader exoskeleton!

Jurassic Park-ty Food / Costumes

When our friend Riley told us he was having a Jurassic Park themed birthday party, we were overwhelmed with ideas to help make it memorable and excellent. Little plastic mosquitoes frozen in pale juice amber? Make a tray for drinks, tape a cell phone to the bottom that is set up to periodically vibrate to make the ripples in the drinks?

It was clear that guests and hosts were going to go all out with costumes, decorations, etc (see the evidence here) so we wanted to do our part. We watched the movie to get more ideas, and in the end decided to do fossil cookie excavation (from the early scenes in the desert) and a cake for the front gate to jurassic park (so we'd have an excuse to incorporate flame). We also made some little dino side dishes from a special effects cookbook we had, a little stegosaurus avocado to go with chips, and an apatosaurus watermelon bowl.

For the fossil cookies, Sarah made a custom dinosaur footprint cookie cutter by cutting up an old catering tray we had:


We also made some bone cookies (from a dog bone cutter we had), one person cookie , and then I hand cut a trilobite and a t-rex skull:


The fun part was that we then laid out the cookies on a tray, covered
them with cinnamon sugar, and dusted a bit of cocoa on top for color
(so it looked like dirt and sand), and left a little brush on top of
the whole thing to excavate the cookies:


For the cake, since a gate isn't that cool looking, we wanted to add a sound and motion component as well as the flame (we'd done flaming sugar cubes before in other cakes). I found a talking horse birthday card where you could record your own audio and the horse would play the audio while his mouth opened and closed. So here's the plain ol' boring cake before being lit and opened:

And here's the reveal where we light it and see what's inside:


In the light the roaring looks like this:


We also made a fruit bowl out of a watermelon and cucumbers (it looked better earlier before the legs collapsed as the toothpicks cut into the cucumber), and a stegosaurus out of avocado:


The other really serious effort went into Sarah's costume. We didn't want to buy anything, so I just wore a Mexican wrestling mask I had and went as a dinosaur, and Sarah wore a lab coat I had to be a scientist. But she really wanted to be a dinosaur geneticist, so she made this baby dinosaur out of a glass vase, paper mache, duct tape, foil, and brilliance:


Here is what we looked like at the actual party:

I can't stress enough how fantastic everyone else's costumes and decorations were, you can see more pictures from the party, and there were people dressed as virtually every character, isla nublar beer, dino egg party favors, inflatable dinosaurs, dino kites, test tubes to drink out of, and the list goes on and on. Here is one example of some of the excellent costumes (man on safari being eaten by tiny dinosaurs, triceratops in cocktail dress, and lawyer who got eaten):

Pumpkin Cake with Chocolate-Almond Ganache and Cinnamon-Coffee Sauce

We made this cake from the Millennium Cookbook for our neighbors Ben & Dawn. It was almost very tasty, but it definitely came out too dry. We used almonds instead of hazelnuts b/c who wants to peel those dame hazelnut skins off?!

Here's how it looked when cut: