With rain falling and the nearest pillow calling, this will be brief. It's Christmas week and the time for gift giving - and while we can't go all Oprah and yell, 'You get a car, and you get a car, and...', we can offer you some heavily guarded recipes for our favorite holiday sweets. Read on.
The first recipe of the week (yes, there may be more to follow) is for the biggest seller from The Frosted Bowl, the Cinnamon Bundt Cake. We sold thousands of these during our short stint on 41st street, and folks have been asking for the recipe. Mom actually found it in a newspaper back in the 1970's, and she's been making them ever since. For someone who was so keen on us sharing as children, she certainly hasn't been that interested in handing out the recipe. But here you go.
Cinnamon Bundt Cake
Mix in a large bowl:
1 yellow cake mix (We like Duncan Hines)
1 small instant vanilla pudding
¾ cup cooking oil
¾ cup water
4 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp butter flavoring
¼ cup chopped pecans (optional)
Beat eight minutes at high speed w/ electric mixer. (We never go more than about 4-5 minutes.)
Mix together for filling:
½ cup sugar
2 tsp cinnamon
¼ cup chopped pecans
Put a layer of cake batter into a greased fluted tube pan then sprinkle on ¼ of the cinnamon mixture. Repeat with cake mixture and cinnamon until all is used. Bake at 350 degrees for 50 – 60 minutes or until done.
When the cakes are cool, glaze with a mixture of:
1 cup powdered sugar
½ tsp vanilla flavoring
½ tsp butter flavoring
Enough water to make glaze dribble down the cake
A few notes:
1. When using miniature fluted tube pans, reduce the cooking time to 15 minutes. Do not bother layering the mixture for the smaller pans… just mix it all together.
2. At the shop we didn't add the pecans.
3. You'll likely need to double or triple the glaze recipe. Or more. We like it.
4. We're partial to the Nordic Ware brand of pans, and I believe Walmart has some that are appropriate for the home baker.
When you're finished they should look something like this:
Sometimes if you're really lucky and if you're friends are cool and like cinnamon bundt cakes enough, they'll pose for goofy pics to get them.
Pookie and her birthday cakes.
Finally this post wouldn't be complete without a song, so we leave you with one of our new favorite Christmas tunes that a new friend introduced us to. It's good. Until next time...
With a weary mind, cold body and much to share, I find myself at this, our very new and very plain blog. The old one (www.thecakewhiskerer.blogspot.com) felt neglected, copped an attitude and locked us out, so with the publication of this entry, our divorce becomes final.
The Tulsa State Fair has come and gone, and folks have asked about the Sugar Art Show and our participation (or lack thereof) in the event. Okay. Here's the story. I first chose to enter the show last year. At the time I was interning with Jennifer Jones at Icing on the Top (now in downtown Tulsa), and she supported the decision. Since the entry fee was minimal and the requirements low, I sent in the appropriate forms and payment to enter three cakes into the lowest category that I thought I could get away with. Looking back there may have been more than three entries, but it's been awhile. For sure I wanted to enter a guitar - simply because I know of nobody else locally who makes a life-sized stand up version. The other cake that I definitely wanted to make was going to win the People's Choice award. I just knew it! It was genius - or so I thought in the beginning. I realize now that it was teetering on that edge of where genius meets insanity. The cake that I thought was a sure winner in the minds of John Q Public was a life sized traffic barrel. It was to be complete with a 'light' of isomalt sugar and the dirty sand and chocolate mud on the sides. It was to have a plaque that said Welcome to Tulsa or maybe Living on Tulsa Time. The specifics were to be determined, but I knew it would be a winner given the state of Tulsa's streets.
One afternoon between the time of entering and the time for the show, I was driving home and as I rounded the corner I saw a sign from God laying in the street. There unattached to any barrel and away from any construction zone was a light from a traffic barrel. It was exactly what I needed to make a mold to pour molten sugar in. I drove by thinking should I? Should I not? Was I raised to be a thief? Would it be thieving if I just borrowed it for the project? I could always go back and toss it out the window after I was finished with it, right? Surely it'd be fine. So after exercising some mad rationalization skills, I quickly circled back and snatched the light. It was game on and victory was in sight. Later that night I went online and ordered the quite expensive chemical/putty stuff to make the mold and the special sugar to pour in it. I'd never attempted any mold making or sugar sculptures before, but how hard could it be?
As the date of the competition approached, I went shopping for ingredients. Since the cake wasn't to be tasted, I didn't need to worry about moisture or flavor. It was all about the look. I told the chef at school that I'd be taking the week off from externing to work on the show entries, and that's when the fun really began. I had borrowed very large half circle pans from Jennifer Jones and commenced to mixing and baking. If I recall correctly, it was determined that I needed approximately 38 of the half circles to complete the barrel. There were two of the pans, and they baked for over an hour each time. I worked around the clock and by the time Thursday of the competition week came around, I had decided to nix the third entry (which was to be a wedding cake or something equally pretty. I really had no idea or inspiration for that one.)
At that point the guitar cake had been baked and carved and was on it's board ready to be iced and decorated, and the barrel cake had been baked and mostly carved. The sugar light had been molded and was in two pieces ready to be attached to the top of the mammoth cake. The supports for the barrel cake had been cut from 1/2 inch plywood, and portions of the cake were ready to ice and fondant cover. The plan was to cover it all and then paint the stripes on in orange. As the hours flew by, I grew tired but pressed on. We had a cool cake in the making, and I felt that it would get attention for the soon to be formed Frosted Bowl Bakeshop.
By Friday the guitar still hadn't been fondant covered or decorated, and the edible strings were going to be tricky. The barrel cake had been carved, crumb coated and partially fondant covered, but it wasn't good. Any chance for cool had slipped away with the time. I was relatively new to the fondant scene and wasn't prepared to hand roll and cover such a huge cake on my own. I've no sheeter, and the cake truly was huge. In an attempt to make the best of the situation, I went ahead and started painting the orange stripes on. I taped off the edges and fired up the airbrush - another new to me toy that I had simply purchased online and really knew very little about (Don't know much about...).
The striping didn't go so well, and the seams of the fondant were far too obvious. I hated it. The cake looked nothing like I had originally envisioned. It was Friday and any entries had to be delivered to the fairgrounds in approximately 16 hours. There was no way that I could finish the cake and make it presentable enough to display at such an event. The guitar cake wasn't finished either and still had approximately 10 hours of work left before it's completion - and that wasn't taking into account the strings which needed to be edible to be entered into the show (We typically use real strings on guitar cakes). On top of that, even if I could have finished the barrel cake, I had no plan for transporting it. It was tall, and it was heavy, requiring more brawn than I possess. I had measured (though a little late in the game) and realized that it would not fit in any family vehicle. I would have needed to rent a truck or borrow a church van and remove the back seat. This was doable, but time was too short and I was too tired. The cake was a beast, and I was finished fighting it. I left the battlefield and crawled into bed only to be awakened Saturday morning by an irritated chef from the school who was calling and looking for my entries at the fair. After a brief lecture that I only partially comprehended, I rolled over and slept until the afternoon.
The aftermath of the cake war was less than pleasant to wake up to. It took days to clean, and when trash day rolled around, it was all I could do to haul the cake to the curb after splitting it into barely manageable pieces. And that is my Sugar Art Show experience from 2010.
Fast forward to 2011. The show was coming up, we had a shop and Tulsa still had construction almost everywhere, so I thought 'why not?' (me on a rainy day...).
The oven was much bigger this year. I could bake six or eight of the pans at one time. It would be a cake walk (pun intended). I sent in registration and entry fees for three cakes again and got to it. The issue this year was that although we were working in a commercial kitchen with much more space and better equipment, I had other orders to take care of. If you've read anything over at the original blog, you know that running the shop is a full time job for more than one person, so in the end I baked around 16 of the large half rounds (in our own larger pans this year) before deciding that entering the show wouldn't be worth all of the work involved. One of the main reasons for wanting to do such a cake was to get attention for the shop, but we already had more orders than we could keep up with. Why would I want to turn even more people down when they called?
I didn't even finish baking the rest of the layers. The baked cakes went straight into the dumpster behind the shop, and I don't know that I'll ever actually enter the sugar art show. Up to this point the show has been nothing but very expensive lessons learned. Pictures from the 2010 attempt are below.
The base tiers and the start of the carving.
The turntable and a small portion of the carved scrap.
The entire structure without the topper sitting on the kitchen counter.
Our first homemade mold. Not so great but it sufficed.
The two pieces of the light.
Moving on to less depressing things. Last week Buddy Valastro was in Tulsa for his Baking with the Boss show. The Frosted Bowl held a contest earlier this year and gave away a few tickets on Facebook, but we also purchased tickets to attend the show ourselves. The show was entertaining enough, but one of the funniest moments of the evening was before the show even started, and it involved the audience and not Buddy.
The stage set up for the show was pretty simple - a table with a floor length linen, some backdrops and a tweet screen. See below.
The cool part was that audience members could tweet Buddy's Twitter page, and their tweets would show up on the screen for all to see. Most spoke of excitement for being at the show and how stoked they were to be seeing Buddy momentarily. My sister, Mandy, looked over and said, "What is that? Facebook?". We aren't the most technologically advanced family. When we told her it was Twitter, "Oh," she said. Mere minutes later she leaned over (grinning) to ask if I could see the top line. When I read the top line, I was simultaneously shocked, awed, mortified and thoroughly impressed. Unbeknownst to me she had created a new Twitter account and posted to the tweet screen. Her comment was brief: 'sexy hot single white male row H seat 20 @cakebossbuddy!!. Immediately people in our area of the Chapman Music Hall started looking in our direction. The people behind us suggested I stand. I did not. The lady beside me looked and said, "That must be you! I'm 21!" Seconds later someone tweeted to the screen something along the lines of 'Hey Single Male. Hit the bars and not the cake show'. Thankfully the theater is large and the tweet screen was hopping with other excited people, so the desperate personal ad didn't stay on the screen long. During all of the excitement, I failed to zoom in and take a picture of the screen but was able to log into Twitter later and take a screenshot of her original comment - though it appeared to have been removed from Buddy's page. As embarrassed as I was at the time, Mandy's prank was sheer genius, and I only wish that I'd thought of it.
And that brings us to the final, and perhaps the most significant topic of discussion for tonight - a sayonara of sorts. For those who are from Sand Springs or who have called or emailed the shop over the last few weeks, this may be old news, but after much soul searching, I've decided to close The Frosted Bowl. The reasons for this are many, and I won't be able to touch on all of them here. If you read the most recent post on the old blog, you can likely guess. Basically I felt like the shop was sucking the life out of me. I was missing too much. Punctual church attendance was almost nonexistent over the last eight months. I missed family functions. My friends' children were having birthdays, and I wasn't there. Saturday game nights at D's had vanished. This may be where you're thinking 'DUH! You started a new business, moron! What did you expect?! I beg your pardon?'
Please don't misunderstand. I'm not opposed to hard work, and I didn't expect it to be easy - but I also didn't expect to give up so much to make the business go. And even after giving up what seemed like everything that mattered, the business side of the shop wasn't stellar. Don't get me wrong. We had plenty of business. We turned down orders everyday. I physically couldn't keep up with all of them. Already I would go far too long without sleep to get cakes done on time. The longest that I went was over 41 hours, and it got to the point that I was on many occasions too scared to drive alone for fear that I would fall asleep and kill myself or someone else. When I slowed to make a turn and dozed off in the street instead and when I fell asleep while filling out a receipt in Red Lobster, I knew something had to give. The day that we had a wedding cake fall over and mom and I almost went into cardiac arrest sealed the deal (I'll save that story for another day).
Another issue is that I'm a little too much of a giver. I'm not good at taking your money. Seriously. For those who think our prices were high, let me assure you they weren't. I can give example after example of where I undersold cakes. I know this because I frequently send cake pics to friends and shop owners in the business and ask them for their professional opinions and their pricing. A cake I sold for $98, they'd sell for over $200. The wedding cake I priced at $800, they said no less than $1,500. The beach cake I sold for $100 because I liked the lady would have been over $500 at their shop, and the list goes on and on and on. It really is a problem that I'm slowly working on. It's not that I don't believe my labor or our product isn't worth the money. It's taken me a long time to say this, and I don't say it often, but I believe we do good work - most of the time and when we're not trying to pump out a dozen (or more) cakes in a 36 hour period. It's just that I try to be a people pleaser. It's a sickness, I think.
The easy answer and perhaps the most logical thing to suggest is to raise prices and hire some help with the decorating. Don't quit. My issue with that is 'who do I hire?'. I'm by no means saying that I'm the best - because I'm not - but I'm very hard to please. I'm borderline obsessive compulsive now and then and I have a hard time letting others do work that will ultimately have my name on it. Sure, we had interns, but I found that I was redoing their work after they left - not because it was necessarily bad, but because I thought whatever it was at the time could have been better. Perhaps it isn't healthy, but it's me. I'm the guy who had friends over to decorate for Christmas and then completely stripped and redecorated the tree when they left. Again it wasn't wrong necessarily, but it wasn't quite right in my eyes. Years ago when I was a trainer in an office setting, I would go around the empty training room before class and sit in all of the chairs to adjust the height of them, so that everything in the room looked uniform when the people arrived. Someone once said that presentation is everything and I was just dumb enough to believe them.
So now that I've bared all, what's next. Ideally I'll land back at the company where I spent almost 11 years. There are potential opportunities in that area, and I'm holding out hope that they come my way (I'll be holding out hope to you...). It'd be great to be back in the company that I always planned to retire from and with the people that I spent most of my adult life with.
Until an office job with normal hours is landed, I'll be around and making a limited number of cakes on the side from my home. The lease at the shop is up, and most of the equipment has been sold, so workspace is limited. If you're reading this lengthy blog and freaking out because you have a cake on order, don't stress. We'll honor our commitments if you still want us, and we'll be in touch as your order dates approach. I've toyed with the idea of having a minimum order dollar amount for new orders, but no decision has been made. We still have the Facebook page (obviously), and the shop phone has been transferred to the house, though I've fallen very behind on both messages and emails. I'm not sure how long I'll keep the separate phone line, but I think it's fading fast. I'll likely blog more frequently, but I'll not always be so wordy. I'll be sharing some of the heavily guarded recipes from The Frosted Bowl on the blog as well - but don't tell mom.
Now that the cat is out of the bag, I'll close - but not before suggesting that you not feel sorry for us. I'm fine with the closing of the shop. It was fun spending time with the family, it was great meeting so many amazing people in and around the community, and I've learned a ton, but I'm ready to move on, and I believe that it's the right thing to do. The shop was something that I think needed to be attempted once, and the timing for it when we opened was likely (in the words of Elvis) 'now or never'. However, since making the decision to close, I've made it to church at least three times a week and I've been early a few times. Just this last weekend I went to a birthday party at the home of some friends. I've even sat on the couch at home, and life has been good. And while I'm not completely certain what the next month or the next year holds, in my gut I know that I'm headed somewhere good.
I leave you with one more tune that keeps popping up these days. Over the last couple of months on some of the darkest of days when I've been beyond weary and stressed to what I thought was my personal limit, I've climbed into the car and this song has been on. You may call it irony, but I think it's something more. Thanks for reading.
