The Art.
A few weeks ago, I made these cute Chocolate Mice. I had 50 of them to work with, so after using them to reenact "Desperate Mousewives" in my gingerbread houses and pranking people in the lab, I decided to put them on my sister's birthday cake. This was simple enough, except for the fact that my sister lives 900 miles away in Colorado. So, I baked up some cake layers and took them to the airport, planning to assemble them with rosy pink icing once I got there. Everyone at airport security lost it when they saw the chocolate mice, but they all assumed that the undecorated cake was wheels of cheese. I concluded that this was a much more ingenious decorating idea, and so I decorated it as you see it now. This cake probably has the highest cute:difficulty ratio of anything I've ever made, and I have the unusually friendly TSA agents to thank for it.
The Science.
Some of you may be asking, "Why didn't you just bake the cake when you got to Colorado, and avoid the hassle?" That is a very good question, and the answer is one that I give quite bitterly, as a baker who lived in Colorado for two decades. While this climate is great for generating breathtaking landscapes, skiing, and rock climbing, the high altitude of my home state made it nearly impossible for me to bake cakes. This is due to the fact that the atmosphere is thinner, which lowers the boiling point of the water within cake batter. As Susan Purdy explains in her book, Pie in the Sky, water vapor leaving cake batter at low temperatures can cause cakes to have a coarse texture, "fall," and inhibit browning [1]. There are adjustments you can make to recipes to compensate for high altitudes, but each cake is different and can require its own tweaking. I have spent so much of my time perfecting my cake recipes at sea level the past few years, I was not about to go and try my luck on the Mount Doom of cakes. The simplest way for me to bring my sister a cake that had a moist, fine texture was for me to bake it in my own kitchen.
The Recipe.
For this cake, you can follow the directions for my fluffy white cake recipe and vanilla buttercream. I used 6"x3" round pans, so I had batter left over to make some cupcakes. Before icing the cake, I cut a small sliver out of one of the layers, to make it look like a cheese wheel that had been cut. I used Wilton icing colors Yellow and Orange to tint the icing a cheesy yellow. You may tint your icing differently, depending on what type of cheese you want your cake to look like. Finally, I arranged the chocolate mice around the cake, and finished it off with chocolate sprinkle "droppings." The cake can be stored at room temperature for a few days, or frozen in an airtight container for up to one month. 1. Purdy, Susan. Pie in the Sky: Successful Baking at High Altitudes. New York, NY: William Morrow Cookbooks, 2005.
