Icing Outside the Lines
Ronna Welsh
I made this cake for a recent dinner party at my kitchen studio. It's my mom's famous carrot (with pecans, not walnuts, cinnamon only and no cloves, and caramel filling). The icing is classic cream cheese.
I took its picture, though the top of the cake reveals my struggle with a thick, stiff frosting. I wanted to capture a moment where I was failing to do one thing well, until I saw options for doing it differently. Here, I decided, it was better to decorate the plate, not the cake itself. The number of icing "stars" matched the celebrant's age. To serve, I placed a sparkler on top.
I needed to buck convention to save the cake. Three cheers for icing outside the lines!