Thorax Cake by Barbara Jo see url at bottom of the post so that you can see the pics
I generally make a bleeding heart cake for our annual pumpkin carving party (Pumpkinfest). Sometimes the heart beats, sometimes it's anatomically correct, and so on and so forth. This year I decided to go the whole hog and make an entire thoracic cavity cake. The plan was for each organ to be made out of a different kind of cake and to secrete a different color of fluid when it was cut into. Previous heart cakes have bled fresh, homemade raspberry sauce. This year I made raspberry, strawberry, kiwi, mango, and blueberry sauces. Sadly, the organs didn't bleed as well as I had hoped when I cut the cake, as each organ was relatively small and couldn't hold much sauce. Also all the moving around after filling the organs made it hard to keep the sauce contained in the little cavities I hollowed out. The heart bled pretty well, but the other organ fluids weren't very dramatic. On the bright side, there were lots of leftover sauces, which were all quite delicious. But I'm getting ahead of myself. My intended organ-cake-sauce combinations were as follows. Heart - orange cake with raspberry sauce Lungs - apple spice cake with strawberry sauce Kidneys - orange cake with blueberry sauce Stomach - ginger cake with mango sauce Liver - chocolate cake with kiwi sauce Small Intestine - jelly roll with red currant jelly Unfortunately the liver suffered a complete structural failure when I tried to transfer into place within the rib cage, so it had to be eliminated from the presentation. I like to think that the liver was the tastiest bit and so whoever ripped this unfortunate man apart (Barbara May thinks it was Klingon because it was slightly larger than life size, but I'm not sure Klingons have the same internal organ structure.) ate the liver first before it ever got to our pumpkin party. After baking all the different types of cakes, I carved them into the shapes of the appropriate organs, using my handy Gray's Anatomy as a reference. I then flipped each organ over, hollowed out a cavity in the center and frosted the inside of the cavity and the underside of the cake with buttercream frosting. After spooning in the fruit sauces, I sealed the cavities with a layer of fondant icing and flipped the organs back over. The heart and the lungs I covered with white modelling chocolate and the kidneys and stomach I covered with fondant icing. Both had their advantages and their disadvantages. White modelling chocolate tastes better than fondant and it sticks to itself better than fondant, but it's more difficult to work with on cakes like these which were relatively unstable due to the hollows in the middle. Also, modelling chocolate is difficult to paint with paste food coloring, which is what I usually use. It can be painted easily with powdered food coloring, but I didn't have any cocoa butter to dissolve the powder in. The fondant is easy to roll out and wrap around the cake and very easy to paint but it doesn't hold sculptural detail as well as modelling chocolate. Show me MORE! Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 Zombie Cake If you liked this, check out the Zombie Cake http://www.theyrecoming.com/extras/pumpkinfest03/ -- _______________________________________________ Get your free email from www.doramail.com with 30 Megs of disk space in webhosting and e-mail storage! Powered by Outblaze ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Great things are happening at Yahoo! Groups. See the new email design. http://us.click.yahoo.com/TISQkA/hOaOAA/yQLSAA/QXMplB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CAKE-RECIPE/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
