So yesterday was Katie’s birthday party. We had it early this year so we could go with a Halloween theme, and because it sucks to have your party in the middle of December every year in Minnesota. Jamie spent the morning in a panic trying to figure out how to deal with a 28:3 ration of kids to adults, yes that’s 28 children … luckily at noon (party started at 2) the French interns from the school called and said that they would be happy to help. That made it a 28:5 and with the addition of the neighbors and one of the parents staying we ended up at around 4:1 odds against.
However, this really isn’t about that insanity. I wanted to mention my first experiment with our new mixer. Since one of Katie’s friends has a serious (carries an Epi Pen level) peanut allergy I decided that we should make our own birthday cake and icing. Mary has an excellent icing recipe (see below). And I found a blog full of recipes I wanted to try, including one for yellow sheet cake. So between the two I thought I was prepared.
The recipe says it serves 12-16, and expecting to have 25 kids and adults, Jamie said to quadruple the recipe. I didn’t think to disagree. So Mary and I went off to the store to purchase supplies. Armed with a ton of eggs, flour, sugar, milk. We returned home and went to bed to rest before the big day.
I discovered the hard way that the new mixer is prepared to double the cake recipe, but wasn’t made to quadruple it. The bowl wasn’t nearly large enough. This required taking half the mix out of the bowl and putting it aside, before adding the liquids. Then halving the liquid mix to try to balance out the fact that we pulled out half the mix. Which made the entire thing come out funky for a while. The first batch came out extra thick, the second extra runny. Finally Mary fixed it by mixing the two halves back together.
Mary then filled the cake mix into little ghost shaped baking tins, and prepared the icing. Finally we took icing, and decorations, and the ghost cakes and let the kids decorate their own cake. Happily just as they were finishing this the party was ending. All in all a crazy time was had by all.
Written on October 29th, 2006 by Chris Prather