Friday, December 17, 2010

My son turns 1!


The birthday cake


Pirates Ahoy!

Ordered the 1.5kg ice-cream cake from Swensen's. "Pirates Ahoy" from their Cooline Design selection. It was such a headache, choosing the designs.

I eventually realise that my 1 year old knows NUTS about whatever is on the cake (he hardly look at it, even) so I chose a design that I personally like. I thought that those cute lil' bits on the cake are toys that I can distribute to the other kids. Turns out, they are actually icing. PIPED icing. :P

I chose the ever popular Sticky Chewy Chocolate and the Cookies n Cream flavour to go along. Reminds me of their Mudpie actually.

Now about these ice-cream cakes.

I opt for the 2-5pm delivery slot and request that it be delivered closer to 5pm. They called me to say that they can't abide my request and that the cake can last up to 6hr after its packing, i.e. at 1pm.

Upon confirmation, they called again to say that the cake need to be removed from its cooler box 1-1.5 hr prior to cutting.

I tot' of having the ceremony at 7.30pm, so I took it out of the foam box (with the dry ice-layer on top) at 6pm. There are some bits of dry ice at the bottom tray. Should have removed that one, too (more on that later).

Due to some slight hiccups, the cake-cutting was eventually done at 8pm. Oh, did I mention that I can't seem to find any knife? Guess, Swensen's didn't give any, eh? Yeah, 2 hours of thawing, rite? And yet the centre of the cake still remain a block of hard, frozen cream. The first 1-2cm was nicely soft, all right. But that centre portion seemed almost impenetrable!

I eventually got a real kitchen knife and gave a supposedly strong man (b'dae boy's dad) the task of carving the cake out for distribution. Even then, it still took him some effort.

Despite all that, the cake's texture felt pretty good on the tongue, actually. Everyone else gave the thumbs up. However, I should have moved it into a tray or a platter. For it start to melt rapidly afterwards and dripped into a pool of milkshake. An expensive milkshake at that.

If you ask me, whether I'll ever order an ice-cream cake again? Err... Maybe just small one. Not for kiddos. Or dine in and order the birthday surprise. Or simply get the mud pie.

Yeah... Something like that.

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