This weekend was the last of my free time (barring Thanksgiving Day weekend), before our show gets insane. There are six rehearsals this week. Friday night I might go swimming with the new local pool membership, but it is just as likely that I'm going to go home and sleep until my brain stops exploding with all the stuff we've practiced for the show. Sunday was the Sitzprobe and we didn't finish. As irritating as it would be, I kind of wish we had just kept going until we were done.
This weekend was busy for a number of reasons. My husband turned 33 on 11/11/11, so he had a big party. It involved games and food on Friday (with cake and cheesecake) and brunch followed by curling on Saturday. I had medicine on Friday morning that precluded vigorous activity, so I took pictures of the curling through the glass in the warmer area while my husband and our friends engaged in various pratfalls and attempts at sport.
It was fun and Saturday night after the curling was over I mostly slept the rest of the day away. I needed it.
But cake. Really, this is all about cake. Someday I will get out a pretty plate and actually stage the food recipes rather than showing the cake on the cake board.
My husband wanted a marble cake for his birthday and he wanted one of the colors to be orange. Now, marble cake is really easy to make, but it does have a few tricks. Most recipes are for chocolate marble cake. The general idea is that you make a vanilla cake batter that is enough for a two layer cake and then you take about a third of the batter and add either melted chocolate or melted butter mixed with cocoa powder or something similar. You layer the two batters in a pan and then run a knife through them without stirring to get the traditional flavor and color mixing.
It's a little harder with something so mildly different in color, but the idea is still the same.
This cake was an pumpkin-eggnog marble cake, and based on how skinny my top layer was I should have increased the batter. I took between a third and a half of the batter out and added some pumpkin puree, a tablespoon of pumpkin liquer (it is like schnapps and is bright orange), and a bit of pumpkin flavoring. It still wasn't very orange, so I added both red and yellow food coloring (just a couple of drops) to get it to be a more distinct color.
I'll probably be making this again. The recipe needs a bit of tweaking before I share, and not just because the batter was not quite enough for the two layers (in hexagon pans) I was going for. The flavor was pretty good in the pumpkin, but the eggnog flavor was a bit more lost than I like. The frosting was an awesome marshmallow frosting, which made too much from the Martha Stewart site. It was pretty good and only got better when I pulled out the torch and toasted the frosting right on the cake making the little spikes turn golden brown.
I'm making cake again this upcoming weekend (no rehearsal on Sunday unless they are calling everybody for the second bit of Sitzprobe), so maybe I'll find time to fit this in!