Fancy Mixer!

It is a week before Christmas, and the cake is finally completed!

Before we get to that, however, let me point out a cunning way of seeing all of the "cake related" posts in one place; I tagged them as "Christmas Cake 2010" and this is a link to all of those posts.

Anyway, on to the topic of this post. As I reported back in August, my grandfather recently passed away. The estate recently cleared probate or whatever it does in England (I have been away so long I have forgotten how such things are conducted, if indeed I ever knew, and tend to view everything through an Americanocentric lens) and my grandfather's estate (won by hard graft at the drafting table with a slide rule and in the windtunnels dedicated to winning the Cold War. Give thanks to my forebear, any of you who do not live in a Communist dystopia!) passed to my father and his brother.

My father, generous to a fault, passed some of the estate to myself and Liza. He said he thought Grandad would want us to have some of it. I don't know if he would - I suspect he never thought about such things - but I am certain he would not begrudge us it, nor would he have a problem with my father disposing of (now) his wealth as he chose.

So, Liza and I decided - rather than spend the entire amount on the sensible, fiscally responsible thing of lowering our debts etc. etc. - we would spend some of it on some fun, joyful things. Or, at least, practical things with an element of joy in them.

So, we bought a Kitchenaid Mixer.

A brief explanation - not about the Kitchenaid Mixer, which really needs no explanation. It is a mixer - it is the best of the generally available brands, I believe. They are very nicely made and they come with a load of attachments. It is very much like the Kenwood device my parents had and my father and I had such fun messing around with while we made sausages.

No, the explanation is about Facebook and the Lowe's page thereon. Liza "liked" this thing (along with half a million other people) when it became clear Lowe's were posting links to a page where one could register and (if you were one of the first 100 people) get a coupon for a 90% discount of some kind of domestic appliance.

Let that sink in for a moment. Facebook. Half a million people. Regular offers to get many different sorts of domestic appliance for a tenth the cost. Current American economy.

Result : Chaos.

Seriously; read the comments if you have a mind. They are full of people begging Lowe's to post the next item, because right now they are on tenterhooks, waiting for the item, waiting to register. Babies are unfed, diapers unchanged, dishes unwashed, dogs pawing at the bowl expecting Winalot and getting nothing but the uncaring sound of their masters frantically clicking the "refresh" button.

It is crazy. Liza was part of it for a while, until I said "Enough! Let us go, even now, unto Lowes and just buy the wretched Kitchenaid!"

And so that is what we did. It was, ironically enough, the last one in the store. It is quite fancy, although it does not have all the hundreds of attachments. I want to get them, as I am a man and thus think attachments are totally awesome.

Sorry, this blog post has been more about my family than the cake. Let us rectify that.

There is the mixer, ready to mix the first batch of anything it has ever mixed! The previous batches of royal icing have been mixed by hand, but this time I wanted to test the mixer. It seemed excessive, but there wasn't anything else to test it with. Kaitlin & Tim are going to make cookies on Thursday with it, but I wanted to try it out before then.

In the bowl; three cups of icing sugar (which the internet tells me is 375g icing sugar, or about three quarters of a pound of the white powdery stuff).

It mixes! I've added the egg white and lemon juice and, hot-diggity, it mixes! I was so excited during this portion of the process, I can't tell you. Tremendous fun. Worth any amount of money.

The final result - a very smooth, very nice royal icing. Liza said (and I agree) it actually gave a better result than mixing it by hand, which was not what I was expecting. I was expecting it to be easier and quicker (maybe) but not give a better result. This just looked better than doing it by hand, which made it easier to justify the expense.

Not that I needed much of an excuse, you understand.

Here is me applying what will be the final layer of icing sugar to the cake. I calculated - I applied the icing in four batches, two of 1.5 cups each, one of 2 cups and one of 3 cups. So, that is a total of 8 cups, which is about 2lbs of icing. That is a pretty substantial amount of icing right there. Just so we know.

And there is the cake in all its final glory! I did the traditional "spiking" on the top of the cake because, well, it's traditional and tradition is important to people other than rooftop-dwelling Jewish violinists, you know. It now has a week for the icing to set and dry, and then it can be eaten!

We are going to get Wensleydale cheese, of course.