Giant Cupcake

I mentioned in January that when I was growing up, my family had an I'm-the-best plate. The plate actually says "you're the best" but whatever. That's not what we called it.

This is a plate that each kid got to eat from on special days -- days with ribbons in swim events, or good report cards, or birthdays (and half-birthdays, of course). Someone even remembered to bring it to my wedding, and I was served my first meal as Mrs. Goettsch off the I'm-the-best plate. It might sound trite, but it was actually touching. That's because this plate was sort of a Big Deal in our house. [Ed. note: Ashley just cringed at those seemingly Random capitalized Words, so I send my cyber-apologies, but I really did do it on purpose.]

I liked the tradition as a child, and thinking about it when I wrote that January post made me realize that I wanted to have some of those traditions for our family too. Ones that we didn't copy from Mark's parents (like collected sew-on patches at state parks and putting them on our yet-to-be-created family flag for camping trips) or from my parents (like collecting Christmas ornaments from friends and trips over the years, and then slowly reliving those memories every year as the tree is decorated).

Anyway, this is a very long-winded way of introducing our cake pan. My friend Kelley actually shared the idea, and I'm so glad she did.... it's a cake pan that makes cakes in the shape of a giant cupcake! How cool is that? (If you click on the idea link above, you will get some idea of how the cakes are supposed to look when they come out of this pan.) I figured that I would ask for one myself, and master the art of the giant cupcake so that our family has a special tradition for celebrating whenever cakes are called for.

Anyway, I made a carrot cake for Nathan's birthday this weekend (carrot cake because he loves all things cinnamon, and I love any excuse to have to use cream cheese icing) in our new pan. This was my first try using the giant cupcake pan. I think I did ok, considering it was my first try. I did use two boxes of cake mix (none of you were thinking I made the cake from scratch, right?), one for each side. Yeah... turns out you're not supposed to do that. So we had a lot of leftover cake after I cut off the part that baked over the edges. And it took so long to bake all that extra batter on the inside that the bottom edges burned onto the pan... and stayed there when I pulled the cakes out. Oh well, live and learn.

After I baked the cake and glued the two halves together with icing, I realized I didn't just want to smear icing all over the top half. I was worried it would just look like a strange pointy glob instead of a cupcake. So I had the brilliant idea to spiral the icing around in circles in the mold pattern.

I mean, I won't say it came out perfect, but it does actually look like a cupcake, right? Right?

Ashley thought it was a little comical. Maybe like a Dr. Seuss cake or something? So when I put the candle in the top and it was a little off-center, she sort of had an Open Mouth, Insert Foot moment when she implied that a cake looking like this should have an off-center candle.

Fortunately for posterity's sake, Mark captured the whole thing on camera. My favorite part is the look on Ashley's face when she realizes she's started a sentence that there's no non-awkward end to.

[Obviously, before you hit play to watch this video, you'll need to go down and mute yesterday's slide show -- if you haven't alredy -- by clicking once on the speaker in the top left corner of it.]



I love my sister.