I am not demanding when it comes to gifts. My list (when I go to the trouble to make one) can be summed up as practical verging on boring. For some time now I have been dropping hints to my family that I wanted a cake platter and dome—and not sly, subversive hints. In fact, lately they have been something more akin to, “Hey honey, look at this cake dome. It’s on sale for $12.99. It sure would be nice to have that for Christmas.” Seems like a simple, straight-forward request—apparently not.
Maybe the hubby thought he was doing my rear-end a favor since of course once I have a cake platter I will of course be compelled to bake something to go on it, and then of course I will be compelled to eat it. Whatever the reason—and I suspect the only reason has been lack of effort. Up until a few weeks ago I still had no cake platter. But I do now.
I returned home from my annual Bunco Christmas party not with a ridiculous white-elephant gift destined to collect dust on a shelf until next year, but with a mighty-fine, shiny, glass cake platter and dome. That was a Sunday night. Monday and Tuesday were spent sifting through recipes to decide what cake should christen the new platter. The possibilities were overwhelming. There was always the new bundt pan to consider, sitting on the shelf itching to be baked in. In the end, however, I went for the two-layer poppy seed cake with lemon curd icing. After all, our lemon tree had yielded an abundant harvest this winter. So, of course, the cake had to have lemons. Never mind the fact that I didn’t have two eight inch cake pans. Let nothing stand in my way. After a few unsuccessful calls to my neighbors I was stuck using my one nine inch cake pan, and my one nine inch spring-form pan. So what if one was dark and one was light (I now know this boils down to different baking times), and sure the cake would be vertically less grand than it should be. Not about to be deterred now, I plowed on.
PREVIOUS PAGE
