Cake-Al-Plasty: Baller and Incision Tool on V-Day Beauty
One In a Million
There are times in our life when we are confronted with such unbelievable, otherworldly beauty that it questions our notions of sanity. These are the beauty icons we all grew up worshiping. The girls we looked at and thought “why not me?” I think at least two of them were in the Freedom video.
I’m sure I’m not the only one that had posters of these women on my walls as a child.
Piggy…
Rabbit… specifically 1:22.
Greta…
Zinone… specifically 1:46.
Virtue… specifically 2:30 and 4:00. (But please please please watch it all!)
And Velour.
You shouldn’t need me to tell you the time stamp here. If you do, please leave. This whole thing isn’t for you.
Well. Get ready.
Because there’s a new queen in the kingdom.
Esteemed judges, please welcome to the stage, hailing from the great state of New Jersey, the Oil and Petrochemical Refinery State, three buoyant layers of lemon sponge infused with pools of raspberry curd all delicately wrapped within pristinely smooth curves of lemon zest buttercream: Curdelia.
I understand if you need to look away from her.
Her beauty is like the implosion of a dwarf star.
Despite appearances, Curdelia assures the judging panel that her lips are NOT injected with extra cocoa fat. She has NOT gone under any sculpting tools to achieve the pouty lips of your fantasies. She is 100% natural. A home-made, hometown queen.
A Team of highly Specialized Federal Manicurists
Those are all regulation tools. I assure you.
The original plan for Miss New Jersey’s presentation involved a curtain of piped roses. Unfortunately for her (and her legions of fans), after the first layer of buttercream, there wasn’t enough coverage to pipe additional details. It seems Miss New Jersey may have fudged a little on the details of her waist measurements, so let’s just say her evening gown became more of a swimwear moment.
Not one to lose face, Miss New Jersey’s team of handlers leapt into action and used the tools above to get her ready for the main stage. A baller, an incision tool, and a paintbrush are all any girl on the go needs to achieve this natural, no makeup look.
Round, full, patchy red lips are all the rage this season in Paris, so you know our girl Curdelia was going to rip the runway and flaunt her own tortured pucker for the stage.
“Lips that cast a shadow,” was where this look started.
“Lips that could carry a bouquet of Cafe Au Lait “dinner plate” Dahlias” was what our team delivered.
The tools may have been designed for pottery, but they took to the malleable chocolate of Curdelia’s face excellently. Definitely look for more extreme, but totally within pageant rules, body modification horror in 2023’s Miss American Princess Pageant Award Competition Program.
And don’t think we don’t know how her fans aren’t satiated until they see her signature white lashes.
Beauty really thrives in the extreme close-up. I think Divine said that?
Lessons with the Baller and The Incisor
The Right Tools for the Job
I started with just the incision tool, but the look really came to life when I used the baller tool to round out the contours of her lips. I’ve got a whole bag of pottery tools that I’m excited to pull out next time! There’s not a lot to say with this. I didn’t cry, or scream, or binge-eat the evidence of my failed aspirations, so…. a pretty good day in the kitchen.
Force
The malleability of Miss New Jersey’s chocolate lips made this process surprisingly easy. There was a lot of tension in her youthful skin, so I could be really forceful as I pushed and scraped her visage into the delicate pout you see above.
Color
Less successful than the poking or prodding was the staining. There are a lot of different edible dyes, and the complexity of getting the desired color seems to come down to a few factors:
Consistency - liquid dye, gel dye, and fat-based dyes all affect the quality of the material you’re coloring. This means that previously stable frosting or modeling sweets (fondant or chocolate) can “break” when adding color and essentially become soup in your hands. Additionally, adding dry dyes (pigments or gels) can stiffen previously malleable materials, requiring additional oil or butter added. It’s all a bit of mess and I need to do some more research on what to use when. It may also be that I just need to bite the bullet and make my own modeling chocolate so the colors I’m looking for are inherent in the material.
Color - Uff da. The amount of dye you need to accomplish the rich colors of Instagram or delicious, delicious grocery store cakes is horrifying. I talked about this in my Not Red, But Velvet Cake, but to achieve a deep red in red velvet cake you have to use something like 2 TBSP of red food coloring. Barf. I’ve read a little about microwaving color or letting it mature after mixing it, so look for more vibrancy in the future… or more splotches of streaky grey. It’s 50/50 at this point. I bet a year from now it’ll be more like 70/30.
Maybe Next Time…
Ultimately Miss New Jersey was suspended from competition because of a positive test for banned leaveners, but she’s appealing the decision and still hopes to take home gold in the team competition. (Too soon?)
Next time she’ll bring extra frosting to cover her naked sides.
Next time she’ll try chocolate melts to color her lips.
Next time she’ll chill her lashes in the fridge for a while and see if she can paint them black without wrecking the whites of her eyes.
Next time she’ll clean the dirt out of her downstairs fridge where her husband starts his seeds before posting to her OnlyFans.
Lemon Sponge Cake with Raspberry Curd and Lemon Zest Buttercream
Overall I was happy with this cake. The flavor combinations were really great and I liked the sweeter raspberry curd with the tart lemon buttercream. It would have been improved with a lemon simple syrup spread over the layers to keep the cakes moist. I’m coming around to a simple syrup on any and all white cakes. It really erases any mistakes of overbaking (dry) or overmixing (tough) these delicate layers.
This is definitely NOT a begginer-friendly cake. It uses a mixing technique that combines a ribbon of creamed materials folded with soft-whipped meringue. It is so incredibly easy to mess up cakes made in this manner. Honestly, I’m not even sure I’m still making them correctly. If you’d like to make a lemon cake, I suggest using your go-to white cake (even a box mix) and supplementing it with lemon zest or lemon oil. Lemon juice will need to be compensated with additional dry ingredients so…. let’s not.
Cake: Lemon Cake from Flour.
Lemon Buttercream: Also from Flour supplemented with one lemon’s worth of zest and 1/4 tsp lemon oil.
Curd: Raspberry Curd from Odette William’s Simple Cake.
Eye and Lips: Modeling chocolate.
