X-treme Baking

As you may or may not know, one tends to have quite an abundance of free time on training trips. This weekend Becky and I decided to take full advantage of our teammates birthdays’ as an opportunity to waste a little time baking. We did not, however expect it to turn into quite the production that it did. Blame it on too many episodes of cupcake wars or our combined perfectionism but 6 hours, 5 batches of frosting, 2.5 bags of confectioner’s sugar, and an undisclosed amount of butter later we unveiled the finished product, two perfectly frosted cake bricks, complete with GRP rowing themed fondant decorations. What’s a cake brick you might ask? It is a cake that is shaped like a brick. We invented it. Having limited cake pan options in our two rental houses we were forced to improvise somewhat and make one giant sheet cake in a hotel pan and then cut it into 4ths. Two layers might seem like a normal number of layers for a cake to have, but these were not normal layers. Each layer was approximately 2.5” thick, so total cake height was around 5”, yet the cake width was a mere 4.25”. Yes we measured.

About two hours into this undertaking things were moving along smoothly and the end was in sight. That is until John remarked that the leftover cake scraps would make a good boat. As you can imagine things escalated from there and before I knew it I was whipping up a batch of homemade fondant, which I actually don’t know how to make at all. Not to mention the fact that we were missing about half the key ingredients. We ended up with a sugary lump of play-doh that we were able to dye a variety of colors but most importantly empacher yellow for Steve’s boat and green for the GRP cedar leaf logo.