I Heart Color

I have to be honest, it took a good couple of weeks for me to whittle my lists of potential Threadless designs to just 3 that I thought would make excellent Threadcake submissions. It was a slightly difficult task because, a) I can be pretty indecisive at times, and b) I was well aware of the days nearing the end of the Threadcakes contest. So, after much deliberation, I chose the "I heart color" design because of it's fun take on those colour (I'm Canadian, I HAVE to spell colour with a "u") blindness tests that they used to give you in school.

Initially, I was thinking of making this a 3D cake, perhaps out of cake pops or cupcakes in varying sizes, but decided to go the 2D route as I'm saving my 3D submission for another design. The challenge of this cake was not in the transferring of design, but the actual cake itself! A friend's birthday was coming up and I decided to surprise him with this cake as he's in the creative design field and would get a kick out of receiving something graphically different. So, challenge #1 & #2: Make cake look EXACTLY like the original design, while making it delicious enough to serve at a birthday. Sure, not a problem! Oh, wait. Did I mention that my friend is allergic to eggs? Well, there was challenge #3: Make the cake and frosting eggless. Right. Totally possible (insert nervous face here). Add to that a time crunch, as I baked and decorated this cake just hours before we were to leave for my friends birthday gathering. Oooh, I just love a good challenge, or two. Or four.

After some research on egg-free cakes and frostings, I came upon an allergen-free chocolate cupcake recipe from Martha Stewart's "Cupcake" book, which I adapted for my cake. I figured if it was good enough to put in Martha's cookbook, it was good enough for me! That was the egg-free (as well as dairy-free and nut-free) cake recipe down. Now, to find a tasty chocolate frosting to go with the cake. I continued with the allergen-free theme with an egg, dairy and nut free chocolate frosting. I know you omnivores are just drooling at the concept, but keep reading! I finally found a recipe for an allergen-free chocolate frosting that didn't call for mountains of confectioner's sugar (I'm totally not a fan of toothache-y sweet frostings) at Elana's Pantry dot com. It had many a great review, and sounded easy enough to make. My final frosting was a mix of the one I found at Elana's and my own concoction of agave syrup and cocoa.

Remember that time crunch I mentioned earlier? Well, once the cake was baked and cooled, and the frosting made, I literally had just over an hour to ice the cake and pipe the design to the top of it. Have you seen how many dots there are on that design? I piped like a madwoman, but managed to complete the cake in time! Thank goodness for friends who arrive late to pick you up for a party.

All in all, I'm pretty pleased with how the cake turned out. Not only did it look like the original design, it tasted freakin' good! If I do say so myself. Yup, the birthday boy and my friends loved how the cake tasted and noted how moist and delicious it was. I run my own cake business and I'm thinking with a tweak here and there I may just offer this cake as a vegan option on my menu!