Up, up and away!

Today was an awesome day for cooking/baking.

I took the opportunity to bake the cake inspired by the new Pixar movie "Up," from this Serious Eats Cakespy post.

Not a perfect cake by any stretch of the imagination. The cake was much denser than I imagined it would be, especially after I burnt the outsides and bottoms of the cake a little. The frosting was amazing though.

The main alteration I made to the original Cakespy recipe was using lemon zest instead of 2 tsp of lemon extract. Baking can be an expensive habit, so the thought of picking up food coloring *and* lemon extract didn't really seem worth it. Bag of lemons on the other hand? Definitely. So I zested 3 lemons and toss that into the creamed butter and sugar.

Speaking of the butter and sugar: 3 sticks of butter and 3 cups of sugar. The recipe suggested creaming the butter and sugar for 20 minutes. Yes. 20 minutes. Clearly, written by someone who owns a standmixer. Not this girl. My handy-dandy hand-mixer started to smell a little crazy after about 8 minutes, so I shut it down and let it rest a few minutes. I added a bit of extra time in between each of the 5 eggs, hoping to make up some of the remaining 12 minutes.

The original recipe also didn't have a specific number of drops of blue food coloring, so I guessed. I had about 7 or 8, but it turned out not to be quite enough. The yellow of the lemon turned it slightly green. I'd probably use more like 12 or 15 next time around.

Anyway, it looked beautiful once it was frosted. Again, lots more butter involved.

Tons of coconut pressed into the cake, and some bent DumDums pressed into the corner. Beautiful.

Inside view of the balloon cake.

Dreaming? of floating away in an adorable blue and white, coconut house with little candy balloons.