This week marked the first full week of our new semester. New classes, new challenges to overcome, and new opportunities. One of those new classes was out ITC course, where it is split into sections: one section being laminated timber, and the other being casting. This week, we also completed our first project, which was baking. I was in the casting section, and we were tasked with baking a cake of some sort with a partner. So, I partnered up with Jon Morris, and I called my mom and asked her to send me her red velvet cake recipe. She sent it, but not without questioning me, asking “why in the world are you baking a cake in architecture?”
So Jon and I went out to Walmart to buy the ingredients and supplies on Sunday and then proceeded to bake our cake. Oh and based on the above left picture, you better believe the cake AND the frosting were homemade. No box ingredients ’round these parts! Anyway, once we mixed our dry ingredients together, we then proceeded to mix our wet ingredients, and then slowly poured our dry ingredients into our wet ingredients, creating our vivid, red-as-the-AIA-logo batter. We poured the batter evenly into three nine-inch baking pans that were sprayed with baking oil, and let them bake for thirty minutes, rotating them halfway through baking. Once the baking was complete, we took them out of the oven and let them cool completely while we made the homemade cream cheese frosting.
Now THIS is where things got a bit interesting. We then put the ingredients for the frosting into a bowl and proceeded to use the handheld mixer that we purchased. However, less than five minutes into mixing, the mixer broke. Like, BROKE broke. Like stopped working on us broke. I called my mom and asked her what we should do, and she said we’d have to use a whisk and mix it by hand, and use some man power to get it light and fluffy (sidenote: shoutout to Jon’s brother Luke and John Whitticar for helping mix this frosting). A five-to-ten minute mixing time turned into a roughly thirty-to-forty five minute mixing time. Once we got the necessary consistency and lightness of the frosting, we then proceeded to frost the cake. We placed the bottom layer, frosted it; placed the middle layer and frosted it; and then placed the top layer, frosting both the top and the sides. Once we finished our cake, we cut a slice to taste it because what was NOT about to happen was we bring a cake that didn’t taste good to the students and they start slandering my mom’s recipe. It tasted good, and the class agreed, so I’m happy and I’m sure Jon also was pleased.
