Great Moments in Tofu

I invite everyone who has not seen Sympathy for Lady Vengeance to do so. I've had this scene on repeat in my head for the past hour and a half and its making it hard to sleep. This is most likely due to the fact that Meredith and I will be embarking on a tofu challenge in the near future. Inquire within to join us!

My pictures suck but my cakes are awesome.

I made a cake. A fantastic cake. One that I saw on the internet and wanted to make for myself and eat to my heart's content. it was fantastically easy, and something i would recommend for any birthday. or, any day, really.

1 box white cake. prepare according to directions (leave out egg yolks or the batter will be yellowey)

1 box gel food colorings.

Take prepared cake mix and divide into 5 bowls, add a TON of food coloring to each bowl: red, orange, yellow, green, blue. (drat, i should have put some purple in there too!)

take two cake tins, and here's what you're going to do: pour about half of each color into the first cake tin in ROYGBIV order. just pour right into the center of the tin, dont mix, dont smush. just pour. THEN, in the secon tin, pour in opposite order! that way you get a nice swoosh of color in your two-layered cake! woo!

ok, bake.
matt added two little marshmellows just to spice things up.

let em cool, invert, and ice.
fucking delish.

that's right. alf. you know him, you love him. and someone's gonna eat the hell out of him.

while this may not be as unique as an egg-cooked-in-a-tomato (or the tomegg as i called it when it totally tipped over and spilled all over everything, as in "GODDAMN THAT TOMEGG IT WILL BE THE DEATH OF ME"), i would definitely say that this cake is the single-most amazing cake i've ever made. and i was a pastry chef's assistant for years!

the cake was the easy part. cake in a box. (i'm usually really scrupulous about making my own cake from scratch, as evidenced by my year-long love affair with oddball cupcakes (that's a different post) but since this was about alf, i figured spend more time on icing and less on cakeing)

the idea behind icing a cake with multiple colors and getting a good gradation between them is using really soft icing - the best bet for this is to heat up the icing you've got, spread while it's warm, and when it cools it will harden again, rather than using an icing that will stay soft, which may slide around the cake during normal transport. To get the color gradation, we started with 6 teacups, put white icing in one, dark chocolate icing in another and mixed different gradations in the middle four. put them in the microwave for a few seconds each and BAM - ICED THAT MOTHER.

details were piped on using our ever-so-fancy icing in a ziplock baggie technique. put icing in a baggie, snip a tiny hole in one end and pipe to your heart's content.

My only advice to future alf-cake-makers is to not work in a kitchen where the average temperature is 50 degrees. The icing kept setting before we were done smooshing it into proper place, which caused some minor lifting of the icing which kept it from looking quite as perfect as i was hoping for.

go alf!