Day 259: Pain, Pain, Go Away

I don't know if it was from Wednesday's physical therapy or I slept wrong, but holy crap, my traps are KILLING me.  And by traps, I mean neck.  My neck gets jacked, then I subsequently feel the pain in my traps because they get insanely "tense" (for lack of a better word).

I taught Zumba this morning and it was fun.  They were all sweaty when they left, so that was a good sign.  The other good sign was them telling me how much they enjoyed it. Yay.

I've put a bunch of pics up on Flickr and uploaded two videos to YouTube.

Here's the one that I neither emailed, nor put on Flickr:

She took a nap for an hour and a half this afternoon -- it was amazing.  As soon as she woke up, we went out to dinner at La Madeleine.  My folks left fairly soon after we got back home -- to go to the movies -- and I practiced making cakes.

I wanted to see if I could make a cake, buttercream icing, and fondant without taking a class.  Turns out I can.  I didn't buy any of it, though I did use a box for the cake... although I didn't follow the instructions, but made some alterations to the ingredients.

It was not only delicious, but not bad for my first ever dealings with fondant...

Powdered sugar was everywhere. It was all over my clothes, arms, on my face and in my hair... not to mention it was all over the kitchen, too.  I had it all over the counter and on all the utensils I used, too.  Marshmallow fondant is sticky stuff!

The cake is a sugar-free yellow cake with butter and applesauce, instead of oil.  It was incredibly moist and delicious.  The icing is a ghiradelli buttercream icing, then the fondant is a marshmallow fondant, as I previously said.

It's just a 6" round cake, nothing big, but I had wanted to take a cake decorating class, then I wondered if I needed to, so I practiced.  The hardest part was getting the cake right.  This is my fourth cake.  The first two were chocolate with a vanilla buttercream icing.  However, the first cake had too much batter, so it made a huge mess and took forever, then didn't come out of the pan well.  The second cake was leftover batter, but I didn't bring it to room temp before I baked it and it didn't bake long enough, so it was fudgy like a lava cake.  The third was a vanilla cake and it turned out perfect, so I made chocolate buttercream to go on it.

The fondant was a two-day task, so I didn't make my fourth cake until tonight when the fondant was finally ready.  It was a lot easier than I thought it would be.  However, it would have been exponentially faster if I had actual cake baking/decorating tools to use, as opposed to just my paring knife and a rolling pin.

Overall, not too shabby, if I do say so, myself... which I do.  I think I could make whatever, as long as I had the time and tools because the know-how seems to be logic.

I cannot wait until Monday when I can see Kim and have her fix my back -- let's just hope I make it until then :(