Cake # 17 Easter Cake

Since tomorrow is my birthday and Ted's annual family Easter party, I decided to make my cake today so I could either bring it to the Easter party tomorrow, or have it for our own Easter at my house on Sunday. Technically this cake is number thirty-three in the recipe book, but because it is literally called "Easter Cake", I thought it would be appropriate to switch up the order a bit. This cake is ridiculous in cost, in effort, and in time. I suggest that if you ever want to try this cake that you set aside at least four hours to work on it, and that you plan out in advance where to get your ingredients from.  For starters, this cake asked for apple pie spice, but four grocery stores later I decided to make my own apple pie spice, which is four teaspoons ground cinnamon, two teaspoons ground nutmeg, and one teaspoon ground cardamom. Secondly, this cake needed two whole pounds of Marzipan. Now, don't get my wrong, I realize had I walked into Cake Cottage my life would have been much easier because they would have Marzipan on supply, but it is far away from Bel Air, and I had to be difficult. So, this was also a part of the disaster that was the four grocery store Easter sugar dough hunt. So many store clerks, and my mother as well, thought that Marzipan was a cheese (I think they were thinking of Mascarpone), and after spending an enormous amount of time in the cheese aisle and the baking aisle, finally a Safeway clerk found some for me in the very back behind icing. They only had a pound and a half of Marzipan, which was five boxes at eight dollars a box; I was not happy but it would have to do. I cleaned the store out of Marzipan. By the time I got home and rolled out the dough, I had lost another half pound of Marzipan, what I had bought from the store was stale.

The cake also required flour, baking powder, butter, light brown sugar, eggs, almond extract, milk, ground almonds, mixed dried fruit, and apricot jelly - in ingredients I did not have alone, this cake cost well over sixty dollars, the real question is will it taste like a sixty dollar cake?  Besides the expense, this cake takes an hour and twenty-five minutes to bake, then thirty more minutes in the pan to bake after it is out of the oven, then another five minutes in the oven, this time to broil with the Marzipan topping. The Marzipan had to be rolled out, and braided, and then brushed with egg whites, like I said, and time-consuming, and effort-taking cake.

Here is what the book's picture looks like:

Here is what my cake looks like:

Fortunately, Ted and I are finally on spring break, so we had time today to work. This hectic is really symbolic of a very hectic week and weekend to come. It started Wednesday, once school let out Ted and I went grocery shopping for all of our Easter dinner supplies. Then Thursday, we got our house cleaned,  took the dog to get a bath and had his nails grinded, weeded our garden, and did laundry. But then, disaster hit. I debated whether or not to even write this because it solidifies what happened, and that is scary to me. Ted had left to go to the Orioles game and I was playing with Evie. We were in her room, and Evie was getting bored and she wanted to play out in the living room, so I opened her door to let her out, and turned around to through her last toy back in its bin, and then I heard a crash. And then the scream. In the ten seconds it took me to chuck the toy in the bin, Evie had fallen down the stairs. How could I be so stupid? I didn't even remember that I had the basement door open from doing the laundry. I didn't see her fall, I wasn't there to catch her, how could she get down there so fast? I seemed to react in slow-motion everything seemed unreal, like walking through water, and at the very same time, by some trick of its own, time skipped ahead and there I had Evie in my arms, holding her running her back up the stairs, checking her for injury, but also too afraid to check. I checked her mouth first, no blood, then her head, no bumps, then I put her down on the floor and like a rocket she took off and began to run. She was okay. She was giggling a few seconds later. I wasn't. I checked for a million other things, I called Ted, I called my mom, I called Ted's mom, I called the on-call nurse. Everything was okay, but it could have been so much worse.

Whether you believe in God, or the spirits of your loved ones, or luck, or just the resilience of babies, I am thankful for all of those things. I know that there are so many more accidents to come, but that doesn't make any of them any easier, and when I checked my daughter every twenty minutes last night and woke her from her sleep, each time I thanked the universe for her life. And this morning, when Evie began to crawl into the dishwasher, I thanked the air for giving me the patience and the chance to watch this curious little monkey get into everything and to help her be safe.

Hopefully next week things will cool down with some Prune and Walnut Swirl cake.