Horse head cake

We were having friends drop by sometime and got a call about 5:30 or so in the evening asking if they could come the next day. I wanted especially to do a horse/pony head cake when they came, but I have never done any cake decorating before and had no idea how it would turn out. Forgetting, or not caring, that I was not finished with supper, I got up and after some indecision decided to try it. There would be no practice ahead of time and some of our guest were excellent cake decorators. (I have seen pictures of one of their wedding cakes with the most beautiful icing roses I have ever seen.)


So, I baked a cake in my yet un-tried horse pan and was thankful that it came out of the pan without sticking to the bottom. I could use plain powdered sugar icing for the white, mix in some cocoa for the brown, but what could I use for the halter? I could think of no natural color on hand, so I dug through a drawer and found some really old (like maybe ten years) food coloring we had. I did not like the thought of using food coloring, old or not, but could think of nothing else and figured a couple of drops of blue would not kill us.

Then I started my first time attempt at cake decorating. We had some icing tips in the cabinet so I chose the ones that looked like might achieve what I wanted. I had an awful time trying to keep the tip from getting squeezed off the end of the bag. (I asked my friend about it the next day and she told me I could have put the tip inside the bag. I should have called and asked her that night!) Doing the cake was partly fun and certainly an experience. The icing kept wanting to squeeze out of the top of the bag, so there was chocolate cake icing all over the counter, my hands were covered in it, and it was dropping on the just mopped floor. But by a couple of minutes after 10:00 P.M. I had the cake finished, not professionally, but at least presentable. It did not take us near as long to eat it as it did for me to make it!

We are not health nuts, or we would not even eat such a cake, but I and my friends tend to prefer natural foods. We were discussing using the old blue food coloring when one of them said it couldn’t have gone bad that coloring was too synthetic to go bad. The stuff is actually bad when it is brand new. It seemed everyone was eating around the blue halter to avoid the poisoning blue dye! Eventually the whole cake was eaten though, and as far as I know we all lived to tell about it.