Thirtysomething

Taking the Cake

So I wound up finding that dairy-free, egg-free cake mix I was talking about. It seems like if your kid has food allergies you have three options when it comes to baking:
1. make a cake from a specialty mix
2. make a cake from a vegan cake recipe
3. make a cake from one of your regular recipes, but using substitions

For Rolo's birthday cake, I tried out options 1 and 2. I had the necessary substitutions to try option 3, but by that point I was sort of caked-out.

I had the idea that I should bake a cake from scratch. I mean it was the little dude's birthday and hell, he deserves a homemade cake from scratch. I tried a vegan recipe. And it was edible. But it tasted a lot more like a corn muffin than a cake. Maybe that had something to do with the gallon of canola oil in the recipe.

I actually tried cake mix, from Cherrybrook Farms, first and it wasn't bad. Wasn't the best cake I'd ever had either, but it was fine. The accompanying dairy-free frosting was actually good. I used dairy-free margarine in both the frosting and the cake instead of regular margarine. So I surrendered on the "from scratch" idea and went with the mix.

Then Ron decided he wanted to decorate the cake with an Elmo (the theme for the party) and instead of buying a plastic Elmo, he came home with fondant, convinced that he could make an Elmo decoration instead. I totally laughed my ass off at that one. Ron? Fondant? I didn't think he even knew what fondant was.

I should know never to underestimate the man though, because he did indeed make an Elmo out of fondant. Two Elmos actually, one for the cake on Rolo's actual birthday, and one for the party the day after. Ron painstakingly cut out the shape of Elmo from a picture and colored it with frosting. I watched him, with his tongue sticking out as it is whenever he really concentrates on something, cutting, coloring, stepping back to admire his work, covered in powdered sugar. There is nothing that man would not do for that child.

The kicker? Rolo refused to go near either cake. We forgot to take it out of the fridge to let the icing warm on his birthday and so Rolo did not enjoy the feel of cold, hard frosting. And at his party, he was sort of overwhelmed and didn't want anything to do with the cake. So there aren't any pictures of him with cake and frosting all over his face and when I think about it, I could have just made a regular cake instead of killing myself trying to make an allergen-free one, since Rolo didn't eat any of it anyway. I could have been annoyed, but I'm not. The one real thing is that that kid could not be any more loved.

Labels: food, parenting, Rolo

posted by DJ Heavy D @ 7:46 AM