The Cake Is Not A Lie

This was triumph

I'm making a note here:  HUGE SUCCESS

It's hard to overstate my satisfaction

- from "Still Alive" by Jonathan Coulton (theme song to the video game, Portal)

It's no secret.  My husband is obsessed with video games.  And I, by default, am a gamer too.  While other people our age are out at bars with a pack of friends or taking their kids to playdates, we are in our pajamas on the couch tearing through another twitchy masterpiece such as Bioshock or Heavy Rain.  On a typical night, we usually make a good dinner (think cracked crab with blue cheese and hazelnut mashed potatoes and some New Zealand sauvignon blanc) and fast forward through a few episodes of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives and when the plates are cleared...well, let the games begin!   

The games we play together are mostly the survival horror genre.  They have a creepy atmosphere and a really complex story line, usually involving a deranged killer on the loose or something undead.  And when I say "play together," I mean that Aaron plays while I snuggle with our dog and tell him what to do.  Now Aaron does not need some gal from the valley telling him how to play a video game.  He's been playing them his whole life, but my experience with video games was really limited to a few from Atari in the early 80's.  That is, until I met Aaron.  He would play games 24 hours a day if he didn't need to eat, sleep or pay bills.  That sounds like an exaggeration, but I assure you it is not.  Luckily, Aaron also likes to do civilized things such as see movies, cook, and play piano.  But if given the choice, he will always choose to play games.  "If you can't beat em, join em" goes the saying.  I am also not exaggerating when I say Aaron has a rad wife.  

Aaron's favorite game is called Portal.  This is a puzzle-solving game where the player is enticed by a computer voice called GLaDOS to complete puzzles.  GLaDOS sweetens the stakes by promising a delicious cake when all the puzzles are completed.  Not money, not dancing girls, but cake.  The person who designed this game has her priorities straight!  Of course at the end, the cake was a lie and the whole time GLaDOS has been trying to kill you.  My husband, who normally only wears solid color clothing, has 2 Portal t-shirts, likes to say "the cake is a lie" whenever he is disappointed, and the game's theme song is on constant rotation on his iPod.  For Valentines Day, I thought I would surprise him by making him a cake that looked like the Companion Cube, which is a beloved icon from the game.

The Companion Cube from Portal

I have never made a fancy cake.  I am intimidated by the effort and the artistry involved.  My cakes are simple and fairly uncomplicated.  I have dream about making a 3-tiered extravaganza, filled with guava curd and decorated with the most delicate sugar blossoms, but it seems like such a pain in the ass.  I look longingly at the cake section of Michael's and wonder what all those tips and couplers are about.  The most complicated decorating I've done is pipe some rudimentary doo-dahs around the edge of a cake by putting frosting in a ziplock bag and snipping off the corner.  It's enough to elicit the desired effect from guests, but not enough so that I screw it all up and end up having to go buy a Sarah Lee cheesecake at the last minute.  

Full disclosure:  I did not bake the Companion Cube cake from scratch.  I was nervous that I would not be able to replicate the look of the Cube so I wanted to have as much time as possible to work on it.  Plus, I didn't think we'd even eat it (we did not).  This was a showpiece; a symbol of my solidarity (or at least compliance) with Aaron's obsession.  This was not dessert.  I baked a white cake from a box in two round cake pans and, once cooled, cut each round into a square. Since doing all this kamikaze baking the past several months, it was really weird to smell a boxed cake.  It was a familiar scent, but it didn't smell like cake at all.  It was nice to be able to tell the difference and it made me feel like a real baker. 

cake scraps!

Disclosure #2:  I am not patient nor am I precise.  I always eyeball it when I hang pictures, and I don't enjoy crossword puzzles.  If something says "assembly required," I feel the twinges of a panic attack coming on.  That Sven bookcase at Ikea, though handsome and affordable, is out of the question.  I considered my bag of fondant with trepidation.  Fondant is a paste made from sugar syrup that can be rolled out and cut into shapes or draped over cakes and other goodies.  When you see a cake that is perfectly smooth, it is covered in fondant.  I have never worked with fondant before, and it was giving me stress to think about adding coloring, rolling it out and cutting all those angles and shapes.  It was actually really easy and fun to work with.  It was like Play-doh for grown ups.  I didn't feel very grown up making a cake that looks like a video game icon, but I am often in danger of being revealed as a nerdy kid masquerading as an adult, so at least the feeling is familiar.   

Thank goodness I had a small heart-shaped cookie cutter.  Hearts done!  I used the top of a drinking glass to make the circles.  The other components were a little more challenging.  I had to scale them way down to fit on the cake.  I didn't have a ruler in the house so I made a little template out of some thick paper.  It was time-consuming to cut out the 20 pieces that go on each corner plus the squares that went on the top, and I was less than precise in my execution.  I would get the smackdown on Cake Wars, that is for sure.  Once I had all the fondant cut out, I made a buttercream frosting and mixed red and blue food coloring to get that grayish tone.  

Now I had to assemble the cake!  I was nervous.  First, I frosted the backs of the hearts to attach them to the white circles.  This made them pretty heavy and I thought they might slide down the sides of the cake.  And the pieces that go on the corners had to be facing the correct direction, so I had to pay attention.  Why couldn't Aaron love Pac-Man?  Pac-Man cookies would have been so easy!  

I frosted the cake, dipping the off-set spatula in warm water to try to get the texture as smooth as possible.  A little rustic, but it looked like a cube!  I added the corner pieces, making sure they were all right side up.  Looking pretty cool.  I held my breath as I added the hearts, sure that they would fall off.  But they didn't.  I was getting pretty excited imagining Aaron's face when he saw his Companion Cube cake.  He was going to be so into me!  

To accompany the cake, I had enlisted my friend Kirsten to help me re-record the Portal theme song with special lyrics I wrote.  She is a great piano player and an amazing singer and knows how to record music on the computer.  She imitated the voice on the original song perfectly.  I couldn't wait to give it to Aaron.  The original song is a nerd-core masterpiece. You can listen to it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RthZgszykLs

With the cake and the gift ready, all I could do was wait for Aaron to come home. He was working a long day on a commercial downtown and not feeling very well, so I made him his favorite soup; french lentil and barley with swiss chard.  It was our first Valentine's Day as a married couple and even though we'd been together almost 9 years, I had butterflies in my tummy as I waited for him.  

I loved making this cake.  It took me out of my comfort zone as a baker.  It wasn't that it was difficult, just something I had never done before and something that was done purely for the joy of someone else. When Aaron got home, he didn't see the cake right away and when he did, he just looked at me and said, "no way."  He went over to it and basically freaked out.  It was unbelievably satisfying.  And don't tell him, but he may have gotten choked up when he listened to my song.  "It was a triumph," the song says, and it was.  Neither the song nor the cake was a lie.  After Aaron celebrated my majesty for an appropriate amount of time, we got some soup and went in the living room and spent the rest of the evening killing zombies. It was the most romantic Valentine's Day ever.  

Aaron, Owen and the Companion Cube!