Congratulations to Leah Howe on her “Nondescript Building that is actually a Colorful Rainbow of Culture” cake, winner of the Slideluck Bushwick II Cake-Bake-Off.
Here’s how she did it:
- Decide to participate in Slideluck Potshow’s Bushwick bake-off!
- Clear your schedule.
- Remind yourself that you have a friend’s birthday this evening.
- Feel a little uneasy. Ignore it.
- Come up with a design that is sure-fire, can’t-miss, simple-yet-complex; in a word, brilliant.
- Go to your local miniatures shop and pick out a few diminutive Lay’s potato chip bags and a teeny Victoria’s Secret shopping bag.
- Go to a baking store.
- Marvel at the number of items available. Allow yourself a moment to be overwhelmed.
- Move to the food-coloring aisle and pick-out five gel food-colorings in vibrant colors (Georgia peach, sky blue, mint green and rose are good ones). Add black and ivory food–coloring gels to your basket.
- Pay.
- Go to every single toy store in a five-mile radius to look for a toy bicycle, your most important prop.
- Do not find a toy bicycle.
- Panic.
- Go to every single toy store within a two-mile radius of your apartment to look for a toy bicycle, your MOST. IMPORTANT. PROP.
- Do not find a toy bicycle.
- Go to the grocery store near your house to buy cake ingredients.
- Blink repeatedly when faced with the cost of organic butter.
- Experience abject joy at the discovery that the grocery store has the correctly sized aluminum pans, and feel that this is a sign.
- Remind yourself that you do not believe in signs.
- Feel tension turn to joy when you come up with the perfect material with which to create the edible Slideluck logo: red fruit roll-ups!
- Marvel at how kid’s foods have become so branded that you struggle to find a red fruit roll-up that does not feature an animated character immortalized in flat, rolled fruit.
- Be inspired as to how to create the needed mini-bicycle and place a package of pasta wheels into your basket.
- Pay.
- Suffer under the weight of your canvas grocery bags as you walk home in 95-degree heat.
- Get out the measuring cups and set up the mixer.
- Make batter.
- Divide batter amongst all of the bowls in the house.
- Mix in food coloring gels using all of the spoons in the house.
- Layer colorful batters in a baking pan one dollop at a time.
- Bake.
- Wash all of the bowls and all of the spoons in the house.
- Repeat process until you have six colorful cakes and an apartment that has now reached 350 degrees.
- Go to friend’s birthday party and only talk about the cake.
- Show everyone at the bar pictures of the six colorful cakes.
- Realize you are slurring as you tell a stranger about the lack of mini-bicycles in this city.
- Go home and cover the cake-board with two coats of cement-gray paint.
- Collapse.
- Wake up hung-over.
- Take a deep breath and check the time.
- Go for a run.
- Make an impossible amount of almond buttercream and divide it between two transparent bowls.
- Take one of the bowls of buttercream downstairs to the street, along with the black and ivory food coloring gels and a few spoons.
- Add a quarter teaspoon of black gel and an eighth of a teaspoon of ivory gel to the white buttercream and mix thoroughly.
- Place the bowl down on the gray cement sidewalk and inspect for accuracy of color.
- Add more black and inspect again.
- Add more ivory.
- Add more black.
- Add more ivory.
- From your squatted sidewalk position smile up at your neighbors as they come out the door to go to work.
- Remember that you are wearing pajama bottoms.
- Decide that the color is a good enough match and head back upstairs trying not to get buttercream in the elevator.
- Place your first colorful cake layer on the cement gray board and cover with white buttercream.
- Place your second cake layer on top of the first and cover with white buttercream.
- Continue this process until the five layers are stacked.
- Starting from the top of the cake spread the cement colored buttercream over the top and down all four sides of the rectangular cake stack.
- Smooth the gray buttercream out with a pastry spatula until it is all very smooth and begins to look a little bit like a building.
- Feel overjoyed!
- Throw everything in the refrigerator out.
- Cover the cake gently with aluminum foil and place it on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator to firm up.
- Put a small saucepan of water on the stove and add black food coloring gel, pasta wheels, and a few pieces of spaghetti. Boil.
- Remove the now-black pasta from the water and let it all dry on paper towels.
- Cut the Slideluck logo out of fruit roll-up and lay it on top of the cake.
- Create mini puddles out of sugar syrup and glue these and all the miniature props to the cake board.
- Create a mini-sign that says “Slideluck Potshow Bushwick Tonight!” and position it on the cake board.
- Roll up small pieces of mint and newspaper and litter these around the cake board.
- Take the two black pasta wheels and tiny pieces of black spaghetti and glue these all together. BEHOLD a mini-bicycle!
- Gently lean the mini-bicycle against the cake.
- Feel like Michelangelo must have felt when he signed La Pieta´.
- Shower. Dress. Call a car.
- Arrive at the new Bushwick headquarters of Slideluck Potshow and let the nice lady take the cake out of your hands.
- Collect a bottle of delicious Brooklyn Lager from the kind Brooklyn Brewery bartender and pat yourself on the back with it.
- Prepare yourself a delectable plate of potluck and eat heartily.
- Watch as the cake is cut and the gray, cement walls of the non-descript “Bushwick building”, set in the center of the urban city-block littered with trash, open to reveal the structure’s vibrant interior colors.
- Appreciate the metaphor.
- Win! Watch the crowd go wild.
- Have another beer and grab a seat for the slideshow. It has been a good day.
– Leah Howe 2013
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