Today John and I have been dating three years. So, a couple weeks ago I decided I wanted to make a cake. We've both played Portal and we reference the companion cube in the game in conversation on a somewhat frequent basis (yes, we're kinda nerdy).

Companion cube in the game, for reference:

I was reading reddit and saw a companion cube cake that someone had made. They decorated it with fondant. I'd never tried using fondant, but thought it could be fun. Little did I know that I was in for very long messy process. So, following is my adventure making fondant, and using it to decorate a companion cube cake.

I had to do some research to figure out what fondant was, then figure out how to get some. I found a great website that describes everything you'd ever want to know about the stuff. I probably read the entire "Fondant 101" section four times before deciding to try it and making a list of things I needed. It's surprisingly simple. The main ingredients were marshmallows and powdered sugar. I needed to buy some pyrex mixing bowls because mine weren't microwave safe and the idea of putting marshmallow's in the microwave in a non-microwave safe bowl didn't sound fun. I purchased that and a fondant rolling pin.

Friday, I started the whole cake/fondant "process". I put the marshmallows and a little water in the microwave to slowly soften it up. Then, once they were melted, I added the powdered sugar. It sort of got all over. I kneaded it for awhile, using Crisco to prevent it from sticking to the counter and my hands. I had a LOT of Crisco on that counter and my hands were very soft by the time I finished the first set of kneading. I had a pretty big mess to clean up after the initial creation.

I wrapped the fondant in saran wrap, then put it in a plastic bag to sit overnight in preparation for adding coloring. The when I was out getting supplies, I had purchased some gel food coloring. Saturday afternoon, I started to color the fondant. I split my double batch in half, then split one of the halves in half. I used the entire tube of black gel icing on the big portion. But I couldn't figure out why it wasn't getting much darker. Then, I used the entire tube of pink color on my smaller pink section. It was barely pink. So, I wrapped everything back up and drove back to Mangelson's.

I was in a panic when I saw that they had no black gel color left. I started looking for other options when I came across what I had anticipated finding during my first visit. In my research, I had seen little jar-like containers for the coloring, but when I first looked, I purchased a tube of color. As I was looking in the cake section, I found the jars I'd seen online. I purchased more black and more pink color. I also came across a happy circumstance while I was there (on top of finding the right coloring) and purchased a cake circle and a cake box. I had been worried about how I was going to cover it and what I was going to put it on so the extra $1.50 solved those two problems.

I made it back home and got back to coloring. The new stuff was much more potent. I barely used any and got a much darker grey out of it. Same with the pink. After more kneading, another big sticky mess on the counter, and the new food coloring, I had my lumps of colored fondant. One big dark grey, a smaller light grey and a smaller pink.

I put the fondant in the fridge to keep until decorating time came.

Sunday, I made the first of two cakes. John's favorite cake is the Pillsbury funfetti cake. One box makes two 9" round pans. I mixed it up and let them cool. Then put them in the freezer. Freezing cakes makes the stacking, layering and cutting processes much easier. I repeated the process on Monday.

Tuesday I made a recipe of cream cheese frosting. I used Mascarpone cheese, whipping cream and of course cream cheese. I would challenge the average (non-cheese snob) person to find Mascarpone cheese in the grocery store. I walked all over HyVee the first time I tried to find it. I had to ask someone and then they followed the same hunting steps I had taken and had to ask a manager. In the process of making the cream cheese frosting, I had to whip heavy whipping cream. Let me tell you, if you want really good whipped cream, the stuff you get from whipping heavy whipping cream (say that fast 10 times) is amazing. I was also surprised at the lack of horrible things in heavy whipping cream. The only downside to making your own is that it takes a really long times. I don't have a stand up mixer, so I got to stand there with my hand mixer for a good 15 minutes. But, it did turn out yummy. I tried a little before sticking the frosting in the fridge.

Finally, Wednesday I did the big assembly and decorating. I only needed three layers. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the fourth one. I started by frosting the top of the bottom layer, then stacking the other two on top of it.

Then I measured the height to determine how wide to cut the square. I cut the sides off, shaping the cake into a cube, sort of.

I had a bunch of pieces left over.

After I had cut my shape, I frosted the entire outside of the cake. The fondant won't stick to the cake without some frosting to help.

Then I had to shape the fondant. I can't even count the number of times rolled the whole thing out and then tried to pick it up using the fondant rolling pin. I got so much stuff stuck to that stupid counter. When they say to use plenty of cornstarch, they weren't kidding. By the time I was finished with all the fondant, I used 1/3 of the box I bought.

When I got the fondant rolled out, I had to lightly roll it onto the fondant rolling pin. Think of rolling fabric. Then, I picked it up and draped it over the cake.

I needed to even out the sides and top. I carefully pushed the fondant flush to the outside of the cake. I carefully cut around the bottom to remove the excess fondant. I probably made too much, but I wanted to err on the side of having too much, rather than not having enough.

Then, I went about adding the "decorative pieces" to the outside. I used a little water to get the fondant to stick to itself. Cutting took a lot longer than I anticipated. It kept sticking to my knife.

When the cake was complete, I put it in the box. Putting a cake in a box...feels so official!

Then, I had to start cleaning up my mess. I had cornstarch everywhere! It took almost an hour and a half to clean it all up.

So, there's my fondant adventure. Hopefully John will like the cake. I think it resembles the companion cube. The hearts and circles stretched a little so they ended up being slightly bigger than planned. Hopefully the fondant will taste ok. I tried some, and it wasn't bad, but I'm not sure I could eat a lot of it.

Apparently there are these cute little machines that will do all the hard work and cut out things for you, like shapes and letters. I didn't even know they existed two weeks ago and now I have apparently purchased one.

I've finally started working on my scrapbook for my trip to Europe. Yes, I know I went in 2005. I know the pictures are on Flickr and I need to renew my pro account. Anyway, now that I have a job and I'm making money, I can afford to scrapbook again. Seriously, this stuff gets expensive. You want 15 sheets of that cool paper? 47$cent; per sheet, please. And some are more expensive than that. You want alphabet stickers so the titles on your pages look cool? $2 to $5 per set. And you'll probably only use half of them because they don't give you enough of the common letters and I really don't need four Q's or three X's.

Anyway, I was talking about the enormous mess I made in my living room with my cousin and she mentioned she was working on a scrapbooking project herself. However, she has a machine that cuts stuff out for her. Yeah, I didn't know they made those either. I started doing a little research. There are a variety of machines on the market. Xyron makes a couple. Cricut (pronounced like cricket...yeah, I pronounce it cry-cut in my head) makes a few. And a company called Graphtec makes one. All the Cricut machines and one of the Xyron machines require that you buy cartridges you plug in the front of the machine. Then you use the keys and screen on the machine to determine the size of what you want to cut and you can only pick from what's pre-programmed on the cartridge. I could see that adding up fast. The machines got great reviews on every site I read. I have no idea how people made peace with buying a new cartridge every time they wanted a new font or a new set of shapes. Everything I read about the Craft Robo and the Xyron Wishblade said that they were the same machine. You plug them into your computer and essentially "print" to them, except they cut out your stuff. They were both made by the same manufacturer, but the Craft Robo wasn't marketed in the U.S. The only people who didn't like them were the people who couldn't figure out the software. However, I thought both the Craft Robo and the Wishblade sounded cool because you can create whatever you want on your computer or use any True Type font and it will cut it out. Sounds better than buying cartridges for a minimum of $40 a piece.

So, how did I manage to accidentally buy one of these gems? Well, Microsoft is trying to get people to use their search engine by offering cash back on specific web sites and items. So I used their search to find the Craft Robo (which is priced more than $200 less than the Wishblade). I went on eBay, because I could get 25% cash back on my purchase and while I was looking, John sent me a coupon code. If you click the "Buy it now" button, it shows you a sub-total before you buy it. But I wasn't paying attention to what I was doing and I wanted to enter my other coupon code. Especially since it was supposed to save me another 20%. So I clicked the button to go to the next screen and I get the lovely message "Congratulations! You've purchased this item!" Well, shit. Ok, I hadn't exactly decided I wanted one. I was still trying to figure out how to get it cheap and if I was sure I would use it, that it was the best one, etc. So, now I've purchased it.

I had to figure out how exactly I was going to pay for it. That required remembering my username and password for PayPal. I managed to get logged into my account...no small feat since the last time I logged in was 2003. I started updating my information. You know, address, phone number, new credit card, all that. And I went to update the e-mail account and I used gmail's lovely feature where you can add a +blahwhatever before the @gmail.com. Very handy. I'm trying to do this fairly quick because I have to finish the checkout process within 60 minutes or I don't get my cash back and that's a good $71. I got checked out and I receive the e-mail from eBay saying that I've earned cashback points and I try to log into that. But the link they sent me was for their German website. Yeah, good work guys. I finally figure out how to sign into the cashback site and it says that my e-mail address is invalide (because it has the +words in it). So, I have to go back into PayPal to change my e-mail address to remove the extra text. And I'm told that there is already an account open with my e-mail address. I realize that I've set up another account. I have two of them. Awesome. So, to change the account information on the newer account, I have to add a new e-mail address, confirm it, and then set the other e-mail to the primary e-mail, then delete the original e-mail. And every time I do this, I get an e-mail from PayPal. Then I had to go into my other account, and you aren't allowed to change an e-mail, you have to go through the add/delete process all over again. So I pretty much filled up my inbox with e-mails from PayPal.

I finally got the whole thing ironed out. I should be getting my cash back fairly soon. And my purchased ended up being only $40 more than the least expensive Cricut machine (the cheapest of all of them I could find) and I won't ever have to buy cartridges. After reading a bunch more reviews (after purchasing the thing), I haven't found anything bad about it so I'm hoping it's as awesome as the obsessed scrapbookers seem to think. It was delivered today, so I'll pick it up after work and check it out. I do feel pretty dumb ordering something on accident and I'm sure I could have called someone to cancel the order, but it's not going to break the bank and I don't want to screw up my eBay rating. Plus, it could be really awesome. I just need to not make a habit of accidentally buying things.