The Advocate is Comin' to Town

So it turned out to be a baker's Christmas at the Treehouse. Cake boxes from my brother for the Veron sibling gift exchange, "science" of baking books that I have waited for patiently since the summer, a yogurt maker from Bingham, and the jewel of my heart (this is the part were the sopranos begin, a bright light appears, doves scatter & it appears from a cloudy fog)....a white Kitchen Aid mixer... ah...
Forget the Ipad! After years of the hand-me-down hand mixer, a wooden spoon, and some good old-fashioned elbow grease, I have finally moved into the world of "luxury baking" or as some might say...sane baking. I guess I was a good little girl this year...or probably just a semi-decent daughter.
And another Christmas surprise I didn't ask for.....a phone call from the Advocate. Turns out Mama Lisa has been up to her sneaky ways again and contacted the Advocate about the food blog and my obsession with baking. So the week before Christmas I received a lovely call from Cynthia Campbell who came by the Treehouse and interviewed me! The article will be featured in the food section on Jan. 13th.
So Cynthia asked me to have something "cooking up" when she came by for our interview and originally I was going to be trying a chocolate doberge cake for the first time for my little cousin's birthday. But instead, I decided to stick to what I'm good at .... carrot cake. I've made this cake at least 15 times, 3 layers of 9 in. rounds, each with cream cheese icing in between. I usually just do a cream cheese icing with minimal decoration since cream cheese icing is rather fussy when it comes to beauty but for The Advocate I'd go all out with the buttercream decor.
Unfortunately, Cynthia was coming 2 days before Christmas, I had a few parties and dinners to go to, and didn't get started on the carrot cake until pretty late (9 pm the night before our interview at 11 am to be exact). So Bingham offered to pitch in since I also planned to bake a Zulu King Cake. Everything was going smoothly until around 12 am......disaster struck.
Now, my oven is a half oven so I can only bake one layer at a time. As I was pulling out the second layer to check for doneness, fatigue or stress made me clumsy and I dropped the cake.....face down, partly on the oven door and partly on the oven coils! Soooo a little fire started, I began screaming for help at Bingham who had fallen asleep on the couch, and eventually bursted into tears. After calming me down, Bingham started making 1/3 of my carrot cake recipe to replace the fallen layer while I worked on the icings. After rescuing me, Bingham went off to sleep and I kept working into the night. When I got around to baking the last layer, the make-shift 1/3 recipe Bingham left for me, I noticed that the batter was thicker and off-colored...so I stared for a minute....then a minute more....no carrots!! As my Maw Maw would say "Oh Gawd!" but I guess we were both exhausted. No harm done; I just threw in the carrots and continued on. The replacement layer somehow turned out darker than the other 2 layers as you can see in the pictures, but bakers always say that changing the recipe quantity (whether that be doubling or halving a recipe) changes the final product so who knows what happened.
So I finished layering and crumb coating (a primary buttercream icing) the cake, which was sliding just to spite me the whole time, at 2 am and hit the sack. And let me tell you when I say hit the sack it was more like collapsing. My alarm went off at 6 am...wondermous. I hopped out of bed pulled out the troublemaker cake, and frosted the cream cheese icing on top of the buttercream & topped it off with buttercream roses/borders. This was the first time I did an initial crumb coat but it definitely made a different in the smoothness of my cream cheese icing and making the icing less "see-through."
This pain in my ass was complete at 7:30 am......when I started on my king cake. Still need to perfect the shell border, but at this point, who cares. Only 3 hours until showtime.
From 7:30 am until 10:30am, I looked like "somethin' Patty shot at" which is my dad's expression for a disheveled ugly mess. I rolled out the king cake dough into 3 strips & started on the cream cheese/semi-sweet chocolate chip/coconut flake mixture filling......wait a minute.....I FORGOT TO BUY THE DAMN CHOCOLATE CHIPS. After a flustered trip to Wal-Mart, I filled the dough strips, jelly-rolled (is that a verb?) them into ropes, braided them & left them to rise for an hour. During the hour of rising, I showered & blow-dried my hair. After shoving the king cake braid in the oven, I half-way finished my make-up when the Advocate photographer called....great my cakes are going to look better than my face.....oh well. The photographer arrived 10 min before the king cake came out the oven and right before I started with my satiny chocolate glaze. It was like Iron Chef but I somehow managed to finish! Phew.
Luckily I also had some pre-made low fat granola which they took a look at. When they left, I packaged the granola in little plastic baggies with ribbon and a business card :) which I gave away to Bingham's family and my aunts and uncles.

The next day, Christmas Eve & my little cousin Nate's 2nd birthday party, I brought the carrot cake to the "backa hesta" aka Hester, Louisiana for the annual Roussel family Christmas Eve bonfire celebration.


Dad and Nate dig in! I like Nate's way....no fork, just hands.

Nothin' like a happy plate and a messy face!!