The magic of a geode is that you’re never quite sure what you’re going to get when you open it up. What looks like just a plain old rock on the outside may be nothing more than a plain old rock on the inside OR it could be stunningly beautiful, colored crystals that seem to have appeared by magic.
You just never can tell about things that look ordinary on the outside. For example…..Ellie (almost 10) had a day off from school (teacher workday) and since I’m on the First Responder list of babysitters, my daughter called and asked if Ellie could spend the day with me. Of course I said of course. It doesn’t matter what I had planned or what I needed to do, I’m well aware that these days with grandchildren are fleeting so I was happy to set aside everything to spend a “plain old” day with Ellie.
Only Ellie had plans and an agenda. She wanted to bake a geode cake that she had seen on some show or some site or something. It’ll be simple, she assured me, you just bake cakes, pile them on top of each other, ice them , cut out a slice and make it look like a geode. Right. Her idea of simple and mine are not even close.
But, I’m game so we began by making an all-organic, from scratch yellow cake. We cut parchment for the pans, dusted them with flour, blended everything perfectly and divided the batter into thirds so we’d have 3 layers. And they came out really, really well. And really thin. No question about it, we needed more cake. By this time our “from scratch” enthusiasm was wearing a little thin so we went to the store, forked out $1.75 for a cake mix and came back and threw it together.
While the cakes were cooling, I took a look at the site or show or whatever and realized that we were missing a few ingredients. So off we went again, to Michaels to get roll out fondant($$), to Party City to get rock candy ($$$), back to the grocery to get icing ($).
Back home, the cakes were nice and cool so she began stacking, putting a thin layer of icing between the layers. But when you have four layers, it uses up a lot of icing. Back to the grocery for more. ($)
Once the cake was iced, we looked at the box of fondant and tried to figure out how in the world it was supposed to cover our cake. I’ve baked a lot but I’ve never used fondant before. But, in for a penny, in for…..well, the cost of this venture was increasing hourly. I rolled it out super thin, then rolled it up on the rolling pin to transfer it to the cake. Which was fine but no one told us that fondant sticks to itself so part of it kind of tore and it wasn’t big enough to cover the back and….well, we were just “creative” in making it all work.
Ellie set out to make it look like a geode. She cut out a big slice, dabbed in more icing and stuck in two different colors of rock candy, edged with gold. Oh, did I mention buying the edible gold powder ($$$). I just let her do the decorating part all by herself.
But, and by this point you may not believe me, but it worked!!!!! It was amazing and beautiful and we did it and it took all day and a stupid amount of money but it doesn’t matter because we had a blast and Ellie had a dream and we made it happen.
So, when I broke open this plain old day babysitting with Ellie, I found magic. I’m so lucky. But, I do know why Mother Nature takes so long to form a geode, those suckers are a lot of work!
What a great day! (Great post, too.)