Happy Birthday Pops!

Apparently in my family, we like to spread out the birthdays pretty evenly throughout the year.  Rudy's family, however, likes to have a marathon of birthdays.  The Taracena Birthday season starts in May and ends in September with Natalie's official birthday (although we pretty much celebrate her birthday year-round...).  This month, it was Mr. Taracena, Rudy, Pops' birthday, and he was turning the BIG 5-0.  So Rudy, Alejandro, Kid, decided that we needed to make a cake for this momentous occasion.  That, and we just really like making cake now and have a reason (other than we are crazy over anything sweet) to make one!

Originally, we were going to make Pineapple Upside-down Cake, but decided we didn't have the proper hardware or money to buy the proper hardware to make it.  That, and it's not really a "birthday cake" cake.  So Rudy decided to do a little research and found an AMAZING Carrot and Pineapple Cake he found on the Food Network website.  When he told me it was created by Ina Garten, Ms. Barefoot herself, he need not say more!  You seriously need to try this cake, it was that good, so go here to print off a copy of the recipe yourself! 

Now go! 

Well, finish reading this, then go!

So here is our Carrot and Pineapple Cake...

And the side view...

I feel that this is a true work of art since it is perilously leaning to one side, much like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.  I say this only because we couldn't get it to stand up straight to save our lives, so I am going with the story that we meant for it to lean and I am sticking to it!  In reality, we have a hot apartment to thank for this leaning beauty.  We tried putting the cake in the refrigerator for 20 minutes after each time we applied frosting.  We tried working really quickly and only working on the cake for 5 minutes at a time then putting in back in the cooler.  We were going to try toothpicks to keep this sucker up, but thought that might be a bit dangerous for the unsuspecting eaters.  We just couldn't get the damn cake to stand up straight! 

To make matters worse, we tried to decorate the top of the cake with pineapple slices too.  That was a huge disaster!!!  Those slices kept sliding off, ruining our frosting job.  The plate kept turning green as more and more frosting was slopping all over it.  Rudy tried to do some repair work by adding more frosting to the top of the cake that I had stored in a piping bag.  But Rudy did not know he needed to grab the end of the piping bag and not the middle.  So aaaaallllllll this frosting came out the backside of the bag and ended up covering the plate, the counter, as well as covering Rudy up and down.  He almost had to take another shower there was sooooo much green goop everywhere.  And I was completely useless because I was alternating between cursing him and laughing at him.

In an homage to Kyle from Southpark, I have this to say.  You know, I learned something today:  hot apartments make leaning cakes, pineapple wedges slide really fast, and Rudy should not handle a piping bag.  But most of all, I learned today that it doesn't matter what the outside of the cake looks like as long as it tastes AMAZING!!!