Fluttershy Cake

There come times when you simply just want to make a cake.

No other reason: you really just want cake.

So the other night I confessed my desire for confectionery deliciousness to my friend Allie and she too admitted that she wanted cake.  And so the great gears of scheming began to turn.

We discussed what type of flavors and ingredients we should use: whether it should be chocolate and fruit flavored or something simple yet very savory.  Ultimately we did decide on two things: it should be lemon and there should be strawberry something in it.

So having the day off, I began to plan this confectionery masterpiece: a lemon sponge cake would be good with swirls of strawberry sponge and maybe fresh strawberries in between the layers.  But no: that would net us far too much extra batter...although cupcakes could be made with the extra.  No no no...must focus on the task at hand.

And then, I had a crazy thought:  Why don't you use strawberry rum with the lemon sponge?

No brain!  That is far too insane to be effective!  The extra liquid would gooefy the whole thing!

Putting the thoughts aside I went to visit Allie at the library where she works and together we planned out our creation while she reshelved her stock.

That is...until she fell silent.  "Why don't we use the strawberry rum in the lemon cake?"

There is no way this was not cosmic interference that the two of us should come to the same decision.  I immediately drove home to make the preparation while she finished out her day at work and gathered the materials I did not have readily available.  She arrived and immediately we set to work.

And because I have all 4 of my loyal readers in mind, I decided to catalog the whole thing with my camera.

So dear readership, I present to you...

Strawberry Rum Lemon Cake with Raspberry Icing

Step 1: Gather the Ingredients

You will need:

• 1 box of Lemon Cake Mix
• 1/3 cup of Vegetable Oil
• 1 cup water
• 1/3 cup Bacardi Dragonberry Rum
• 1 shot Cruzan's Cherry Rum
• 3 eggs
• 6 Tbsp raspberry syrup
• 1 container white frosting

Step 2: Preheat Oven and Mix ingredients
Set the oven to 350 degrees and begin mixing the mix, oil, water, eggs and rum.

Dramatic dripping!

The batter should be consistently creamy and smell fairly strongly of rum in all of it's sickeningly sweet delicious glory.  If you're feeling adventurous (like we were) add in an extra shot of the Dragonberry.

Step 3: Pour it and Bake it
Pour the batter into two pre greased and floured pans...

Pam Baking: grease and flour in one conveniently lazy spray.

...and stick those bad boys in the oven.  They should bake for about 30 minutes or so: spend your time wisely.  We spent our making and eating omelets.

Oh God...our oven is disgusting...

Step 5: Prepare Icing
While the cake bakes, it might be a good idea to prepare your icing.  For ours, we used the entire can of plain white diabetes in a can and added in 4 Tbsp of the raspberry syrup and a small dose of red food coloring to get us that nice pastel pink (because without the food coloring it looked like flesh).

MORE DRAMATIC DRIPPING!

Step 6: Trim
After removing the cake from the oven, let sit in pan for at least 15 minutes before transferring it to a wire cooling rack.  Once on the rack, slice off the top bubble of cake from the surface so you have a nice, flat surface to work with once you start frosting it.

Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it), the cake was still kind of warm when we removed the top layer of sponge, so it kind of looked like something out of CSI.  We affectionately named ours "face cake".

Step 7: Frosting

Now comes the fun part.  Once the sponge has sufficiently cooled down, place one layer on a plate and cover with a thin layer of icing before stacking on the second layer.  Once the top layer is in place, go around the whole cake, liberally applying the icing as you go until you get a nice coverage of the whole cake.  

At this point, we had covered the whole cake and looked and gazed upon it with splendor.  Then we looked at the bowl of frosting with a small sense of despair because we still had a goodly sized portion of it left and not enough cake to cover it with.  

It was then the inspiration hit.  I added 2 more Tbsp of the raspberry syrup to the remaining frosting and then a shot of Cruzan's cherry flavored rum.  Just to differentiate it from the rest of the icing on the cake already, I added in a not insignificant amount of red food coloring to turn it a bright magenta.  This turned the icing very fluid.

...exactly as planned.  I then poured the icing right into the center of the cake, and with a little coaxing from a chopstick pushed it down off the edges so it drizzled and ran down the sides.

The result was this:

It may not be entirely pretty to look at, but damn was I proud of it.  It was exactly at that moment where I went:  "My God...we made Pinkie Pie."  My parents were more than just a little confused by this statement until Allie undid her sweater and used her help MLP tee-shirt as a reference.  Dad rolled his eyes as per usual while Mom burst out laughing at our childish childish ways.

With great haste we sliced into this cake and lo did the frosting flow.  The more fluid magenta icing on the top flowed down into the slices as we made them and melded with the lemon flavored sponge below.  

At first bite the flavors all swam together.  The sweet tangy lemon danced with the subtle kiss of strawberry on its lips, all the while wearing a delicate pink gown of raspberry with the mildest hint of cherry.  It was at that moment we had a realization.

Yellow cake.

Pink frosting flowing gently.

Shy flavors that do a delicate dance of shy wonder.

We hadn't made Pinkie Pie...we had made:

I am damn proud of the cake my friend and I have made.  I'd offer you a slice, but you know...it's not like the internet is a series of tubes or anything like that right?

...right?.

I am a Brony

There.

I said it.

I can already feel your scorn...

I'll admit it took a little while to get into it, what with the fact that I'm 23, male, and to be perfectly honest the concept of a redone series based on My Little Pony did not appeal to me in the least.  Of course that didn't stop most of the population from giving it a shot and loving every second of it.  My friend Joe was one of the worst offenders.  Every time we'd get together for D&D he'd be all about the freaking ponies and what ridiculous adventures they got themselves into over the course of their 20 some-odd minute run; all of them involving sunshine and rainbows and unicorn farts.

This concept of "Friendship is Magic" confuses and ENRAGES LRRR!

One day though, I figured I'd actually take a moment to give it a shot rather than chastise it and pass judgement without actually having taken at least a tiny bit of a dip into the pool.

At the end of that episode I was hooked.

I really enjoy that they actually took time to develop the characters behind each of the mane ponies, still keeping them vaguely two-dimensional as any children's program but actually giving them a history and room to change and grow.  The animation style actually really appealed to me for some reason, despite being fairly simplistic in it's colorization and shading (or lack thereof).

One thing that actually really got me though was the story telling.  At points: yes- the stories were incredibly trite and I could honestly see where the plot was going from miles away (again though, it's a children's show).  But at other points, the actual approach to the story at hand was kind of phenomenal.  They approached the ideas of westward expansion in one episode as a...herd?...of ponies moved into a prairie town and started to plant their apple trees on the sacred stampeding ground of a tribe of native buffalo, leading to all sorts of hostile confrontation but coming to a peaceful resolution at the end.

And only 1 obnoxious musical number from Pinkie Pie!

It took a lot of guts to approach my friend Joe after making fun of his pony obsession and apologizing for how wrong I had been.  Since then, a group of my friends have all pretty much become Bronies and Pegasisters in our own rights.  Hell even this past Wednesday booze-and-movie night, we spent a large part of Captain America and Hellboy II coloring in pages from a MLP coloring book that my friend Allie purchased on a whim at Costco.

Nothing says "Art Major" more than shading with crayons.

Ah...the fruits of our mildly intoxicated labors...

I am kind of proud on how the shading came out though I have to admit...especially since it means that I may or may not have put in more effor than the show's creators.

Check out General Zoi's Deviantart page for the full version Pony creator.  All the credit goes to her for her marvelous creation that allowed me to turn myself into a unicorn up at the top here.