Sweethearts cake

Arguably the sweetest of all my bros-in-law, PDP got engaged to PAJ last weekend in an elegant ceremony with family and friends. When I first thought of baking them a cake, I wasn’t sure how many people there would be or if the ceremony was to be too traditional to fit a cake in. I was about to drop the idea when I was told there’d be about 70 people. But then ambition took over practicality, and I got out copious quantities of flour, eggs, icing sugar, and cocoa and set to work two days ahead. This is the build-up of the event.

On the first night, I baked 2 heart-shaped pound cakes for the white cake and 2 heart-shaped devil’s food cakes for the chocolate one. The fridge was cleared to accommodate these guys. The next day, I sandwiched the cakes with the help of chocolate butter cream. I actually wanted a slightly overlapped look as you can see in my (ahem) sketch, but I figured there would be too much wastage and there were 70 mouths out there. So I just cut a small bit from one cake, offered it to MK to remove all evidence, and stuck one cake firmly to the other.

For the base, I played with colors and used a chocolate butter cream on the white cake and a vanilla royal icing on the chocolate cake. Desperate attempts to invoke surprise. I used the same material to pipe the frills along the edges. Laziness came in handy when I used the royal icing bag for the chocolate frills as well. The shaded effect is only incidental. This was followed by a delicate sprinkling of silver balls and chocolate sprinkles.

Cake iced and ready, we now encountered a new problem. How were we going to take it to IIT Powai without exposing it to the rain-filled sky? Engineering attempts of fashioning boxes out of mount board and thermocol failed miserably. Then MK, as usual, used his smooth marketing talk to coax the florist to part with one of his boxes. And THAT’s how the cake got to IIT Powai. Albeit without an inch-long portion of chocolate icing. Grin!