More Easter traditions

Lamb cake
Originally uploaded by knitswithasilentk

Last year I made a butter lamb. But usually, The Sweetie's mom makes a lamb-shaped cake for Easter. She hasn't done it the past few years, and had already stopped frosting it, but it makes a nice centerpiece and then you eat it.

We had shopped for years looking for a lamb cake mold - it's a 2-piece mold; you bake it facedown and the cake is supposed to rise into the lid. We found one a few years ago, but hadn't had the opportunity to make a cake in it.

The Sweetie requested carrot cake (his favorite), iced with cream cheese frosting. I did some volume comparison of the cake mold with 8" cake pans, and figured a half recipe of his mom's carrot cake recipe would fill the pan. It came close - we could have used a bit more batter to really fill the back of the lamb out. We used the cream cheese frosting from (The New) Joy of Cooking. It was pretty magical to see the powdered sugar, cream cheese, butter, and vanilla magically transform into frosting in the Cuisinart. It was pretty good, but in the future we'd cut down on the sugar and vanilla, to get a more cheesy flavor.

The lamb cake baked for a full hour (!) and then we let it sit in the pan for an hour. Some gentle scraping with a knife loosened it enough to have it come out in one piece! (Thank you, Baker's Joy.) I piped the frosting on with a star tip. You can see little bits of wooly detail where it worked; some places needed extra scraping so it's not as pretty as it could be. I think the frosting got a bit warm in my hands as I went on. The back I just spread with a knife. The hard part was getting it to stick. (I think the Baker's Joy made the surface of the cake kind of slippery - but it's a tradeoff. The BJ made it unmold so easily!) Two dried currants for eyes and a dried cranberry for a mouth, and voila!

As it set in the fridge, the head started flopping forward (remember, it was kind of missing its back) so I stuck a skewer through it and eventually shored it up with another piece of skewer to make it last until evening. We sliced it rump end first on Easter evening. Yum!