Quick Congrats Cake: Completed

Congratulations to the Dragon Age development team!

(+5 skill points -> 170/400)

Dragon Age was released in stores today!  It's been getting amazing scores from game sites.  I whipped up a cake last night to bring to work so we could celebrate.

Stats:

• 10" square
• red velvet box cake (Duncan Hines)
• IMBC icing and filling
• decorated with cherries
• drizzled chocolate

I gave rose nails another shot, but they still didn't seem to prevent "doming" while baking.  I ended up cutting a lot off the top and having to build up the corners with extra icing to make them appear level.  That was ok, though, because the scraps went to cake balls :)

There wasn't enough left-over IMBC from last weekend, so I made a 1/2-batch while the cake was baking.  IMBC can be difficult to ice with.  Sometimes it slides off the cake or off itself when layering.  It's a good thing it tastes great, at least.

After crumb coating and adding a final layer, I was all out of IMBC.  "Crap!" I thought ... what to do, what to do ... I looked at the cake balls I made ... no, too big to go on to the cake ... Eureka!  Cherries!  I had some frozen cherries left over from last weekend's punch.  Cherries made a quick border and some drizzled chocolate finished it off.

It was neat to use my new squeeze bottles to drizzle the melted chocolate (that I was using with the cake balls) on to the cherries.  It even let me do a simple script!  I was pretty pressed for time because I started so late.  It's amazing what chocolate can save!

Now for the bad news!  It didn't look that good by the time it arrived at work.  The cherries had thawed and were leaking dark red juice everywhere.  The cake shifted around in the box a little and the edges got slightly damaged.  No one at work seemed to care; they loved it anyway!  Congratulations to the team at Edge of Reality in Austin, TX for helping make such a great game!

FAILs:

• cherry juice got everywhere!
• ran out of IMBC
• couldn't find appropriately sized box for transport

FTWs:

• cherries were a good border substitute
• chocolate in squeeze bottle worked well
• pretty good cake in such a short amount of time
• getting more XP with IMBC