After spending the better part of this morning cutting paper for pockets I decided to spend the afternoon playing in sugar. This is my entry for this years edible book festival! Let me start by saying that I am by no means a professional baker so please don't send these pictures to Cake Wrecks. I meant to take pictures of the entire process but that didn't really happen as I got too excited and starting working away.It's based on the title of one of my favorite books, House of Leaves by Marc Z Danielewski. It's a fantastic book, however I would venture to say it's
not a book that everyone will like... it's a little unconventional with words in different colors, words swirling around a page, or only having one or two words per page, there are footnotes, and footnotes for footnotes that sometimes reference things that don't exist.... If you are still interested click on the wiki summary above for a bit more information and go get yourself a copy!His sister is Poe; her Haunted album is inspired by or a reflection of the book. It is a fantastic album on it's own and is even better once you've read the book- listen to it with headphones on as you'll pick up so many little things....
Back to the cake! It's made totally from scratch, I don't know if I've ever said anything here but I'm deathly allergic to soy in almost any form... which means no cake mix or store bought frosting here. The leaves are made from fondant which amazingly enough I can actually eat (but probably won't, it just doesn't taste good). The cake is a yellow cake made from this recipe and the frosting recipe can be found here. I owe my husband a huge thank you for helping me with the two cakes, mixing the colors into the fondant and frosting, and shaving the cake down.It's two 9x13 cakes cut in half, centered, stacked, and then shaved down to make the pitch for the roof.
I haven't decided what I really think of my cake yet... In retrospect if I had to do it all over again I would do it all in green, frost the house in green and make all the leaves green... have the doors be blue ... but that is the thing about doing something once, you get all kinds of great ideas about what you could have done better.For now I'm off to clean up my sugary mess, have some real food, and go get back to my pockets.
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2 comments:
I think it's great! Did you make the leaves or buy them?
I hear you on the soy. Mine's mild, but still an intolerance. And I get so frustrated with the go-vegan activists (PeTA card-carrying cousin, for one) who insist that it's impossible to have an allergy or intolerance to soy, and say I'm just making it up as an excuse for having real milk instead of soy milk, etc.... Meh.
I made the leaves, those are the part that took me almost all afternoon!
Ah luckily I'm the crazy liberal in the family and everyone else saw the 3 months where I was sick as a dog as we tried to figure this all out. I also have to carry an epipen so it helps to convince people that I'm not making it up.
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