A Cake for Celebration and Nerds

The last few weeks have felt rather hectic. Lots of dashing around and frantically trying to get-everything-done, whatever that means.  In the midst of all my self-imposed hustle, though, I was able to help someone celebrate.  And though she said it made her day (probably not as much as receiving her doctoral degree), it made my crazy week better too.

Plus I was able to have some fun in the kitchen.  So it wasn't entirely selfless on my part...but I did enjoy contributing to her festivities.

Our dining room table serves as storage space and cooling counter,
complete with expandable surface.

My roommate and I went on a baking frenzy, making yellow buttermilk cupcakes from scratch (recipe from Martha Stewart Cupcakes) as well as a three layer dark chocolate fudge cake (recipe from Sugar Baby by Gesine Bullock-Prado).  She masterfully produced two icings - whipped vanilla frosting for the cupcakes (recipe also from Martha Stewart Cupcakes) and The Best Chocolate Buttercream frosting (recipe from Joy the Baker Cookbook) - while I played with various candies that would adorn the top of the cake. Have I mentioned my roommate is awesome?

The cake, you see, needed to have a reproduction of the protein structure my friend (the one who was defending her thesis and receiving her doctoral degree) had worked on for many years.  Her lab had a tradition of decorating the cake of the newly-doctor-ified person with their familiar protein structure.  I was following in the tracks of some serious cake decorators, and I feared failure.  Knowing I couldn't pipe frosting with sure skill, I chose candy as my medium.  And even after an hour of cutting and arranging and recutting and rearranging, I still wasn't sure how the structure would emerge.

The next morning, my roommate and I rose early to ice everything.  Then we split transport duties - she the cupcakes, I the cake - and journeyed off to work.  Shortly before the celebration, I arranged my carefully cut candies to form an IgA molecule bound to its receptor at the cell surface.  Yup, I got my nerd on.

A celebration cake for a doctoral degree

My friend loved it.  And so did everyone else.

I thought the cake itself was the star, not it's decoration.  Moist, intensely rich, capable of inducing adult-onset diabetes in less than a slice.  It was the chocoholic's dream my coworkers had requested.

But after my struggles with candy as decorations, I'm definitely enrolling in some cake decorating classes.