I forgot to blog about the topsy-turvy cake I made. Whoops.

The cake was for Lisa, the sister of a very good friend of mine. She’s taking a funeral director course, and her latest assignment was to conduct a mock service for a fictional character. She selected Alice in Wonderland, and I volunteered to supply an appropriately angular desert.

Yes, I was going to bake a cake for a fake wake.

It was my first attempt at something like this, and while it didn’t turn out quite the way I’d planned it also wasn’t a total disaster. Carrington: 1, Mischievous Cake Gremlins: 0. Go team!

I started by baking 6 cake platters, thinking that would be plenty. It turned out to be plenty and a half, or roughly one metric plenty here in Canada. Here are 3 of the 6 platters, and as far as you know I’m not lying about the other 3:

Notice the bull’s eyes? That’s from using little plastic rings set into the cake pan and making two batches of batter (a chocolate batch, and a not so chocolate batch that I’ll charitably call vanilla). When you stack them in alternating layers, cutting into the cake reveals a checkerboard pattern (I learned this from my pal Rachel, who has oodles of bakin’ and cookin’ smarts). I leave it as a mental exercise for the reader to imagine the checkerboard. Feel free to use diagrams where necessary, and show all work.

The 6 (as far as you know) platters then were popped into the freezer overnight, because baking 6 (as far as you know) cakes is quite enough work for one evening. Plus, there were probably video games that just needed playing.

The next day, I made two stacks of 3 platters (3 + 3 = 6, as far as you know) along with a ridiculously large batch of frosting. I used the frosting to glue the stacks together, and then carved them into topsy-turvy shapes:

I worried that the top stack would just slide off, so I carved a little ledge into the bottom stack:

After all this carving, I found that I was throwing away more than half the cake I’d baked. Topsy-turvy cakes are incredibly wasteful designs:

I then frosted the individual stacks, but didn’t put one on top of the other yet. I also may have eaten a large amount of the cut off cake and watched a downloaded episode of The Omid Djalili Show, but I can neither confirm nor deny such speculation at this time.

I rolled the fondant as thin as I could get it, but it was still probably too thick because the weight of it nearly crushed the platters. I probably should use some sort of pound cake if I make another one of these some day.

I could actually see the cakes slowly shrinking under the weight of the fondant, although that may have just been because I was running out of time and frantically smoothing it with a combination of smacks and holds right out of a 1970’s kung fu movie. Specifically, Five Deadly Venoms. (I used Scorpion style, in case you were wondering.)

I stacked the frosting-and-fondant covered platters, and started carving little fondant designs to decorate the cake. By this point I was already late (darn you, The Omid Djalili Show, you were distracting) so I was rushing fairly frantically. I switched to Centipede style, and I was victorious in battle:

My cake-fu is strong.