Instagram Worthiness

The internet, or more precisely Instagram, will probably be my undoing. Posts by influencers and bloggers demonstrate many clever and interesting things. I waste hours looking at posts of the seeming ease of renovating French Chateaus and English manor houses, cake decorating, gardening and countless other worthwhile, but challenging occupations. For unknown reasons, I get sucked in, like entering a vortex, and believe I too can master some of these skills.

This past weekend, I experienced significant Instagram disappointment. Andrew is a carnivore. When my friend Tim sent an Instagram post about a chicken restaurant, Chicky’s, with delectable sandwiches made with chicken, I immediately thought I must take Andrew to this restaurant. The restaurant is located in an out of the way part of Queens, but I found a reference to a location in the Bronx. This past Sunday we made the trek, by train, up to the Bronx, to a place called the Bronx Food Co. The pictures online looked promising. It is located in the Arthur Avenue area of the Bronx, a location famous for Italian food. We have been there many times.

It was a cold and rainy day. We were relieved to see the building in our sights. When we walked inside, we quickly discovered it is not a restaurant at all. It is a communal kitchen for about 10 different restaurants. From the comfort of their homes, people order from one of the restaurants through a restaurant delivery service. It goes without saying, we were quite disappointed. There was a point-of-sale kiosk, and rather than leave without having tried it, we ordered. We joined a group of delivery people checking in to get whatever had been ordered. They came and went. We watched as they held their phones up to a computer device that would read their phone and pop open the door of a locker if the food was ready.

This photo shows one half of the waiting area, the counter and lockers. The 15 to 20 minute promised delivery time stretched to 40 minutes. Finally, we asked at the counter, and they found our order. By this time it was raining more. We walked outside wondering what possessed us to buy food at a walk up window with no place to eat. The answer was obvious – Instagram possessed us. The promise of those chicken sandwiches so richly photographed. There was no place to sit and eat outside, it was too wet and cold. We carried our brown bags of food to the train station, hoping the bags would hold up long enough for us to reach the station. We ate our lunch in the small waiting room, no doubt looking like homeless people. The worst part was the food was mediocre at best. Andrew’s chicken was nothing special and my macaroni and cheese could have been out of a Kraft box. Of course, we laugh at this now and catalog valuable lessons. Do not believe every Instagram post and do go to the Bronx Food Company.

We visited the Bronx Food Company on Sunday, but already by Tuesday my foibles had me mired in another Instagram moment. Habitat for Humanity of Greater Newburgh was founded 25 years ago. To mark the occasion, we will be promoting events throughout the year. In a committee meeting, a couple of weeks ago, I volunteered to bake an Instagram worthy cake to be featured in a video introducing the 25th anniversary. It seemed logical at the time, I had an idea for a cake, I had seen many nice cakes on Instagram, so without hesitation, I thought I can make this cake. The venue for the cake presentation was the weekly Wednesday coffee break. Volunteers, staff and sometimes board members, get together to hear announcements, talk to each other and enjoy some refreshments.

Last week, I baked a practice cake. I know how to bake cake, but my design necessitated using fondant, something I have only done once before. The test batch of fondant and the cake generally came out as expected. However, the cake baked with a significant dome. I went to the internet to see how to correct this. John Kannel from Preppy Kitchen recommended baking the cake with fabric baking strips. I have used these for cheesecakes, but not for regular cakes.

Yesterday, I started baking. As it was to be a three-tiered cake, I was baking it in stages. I carefully put the wet strips around the pans. When I opened the oven, at the end of the recommended time, I found the cakes had sunk in the middle. Oh, what to do? Back to the Internet. The culprit seems to generally be the temperature of the oven, so I prepared another batch of cake batter, lowered the oven by 15 degrees, placed the wet fabric cake ring and tried again. This time the cake didn’t just sink in the middle, it sunk everywhere.

“Cake rings, who needs them,” I thought to myself. “I will start again and forget the dome. I could just cut it off.” I made a third batch of cake batter, turned the oven back up and finally had a baked cake, with only a slight dome to cut off.

Next, I turned my attention to the fondant. In theory, making fondant is easy. The shortcut is to heat up marshmallows, put in a little water and more powdered sugar than any recipe should ever contain. Rolling it out is not easy and to make it more difficult it is not simple to transport from the rolling surface to the surface of the cake. I had placed some strawberry jam and a milk chocolate ganache between the layers and coated the entire cake with the ganache to attach the fondant. On the internet, the photos of fondant covered cakes are smooth as satin. Mine looked vaguely like the surface of the moon, and my counter looked like a rocket ship had blasted to the moon from a bag of powdered sugar.

To acknowledge Habitat’s mission of building houses, my design featured houses around the tiers. I had seen many cartoon cakes online. The kind that use simple shapes, outlined in black to achieve a cartoon like appearance. I carefully cut out house and bush shapes from colored fondant. To achieve the black outlines, I had chosen royal icing. This worked well in my test last week, but yesterday did not want to set up. In retrospect my ratio of syrup to water and sugar was probably off.

After much labor, I finally had three cake layers. It took far more hours than I originally planned. My efforts were meager at best. If I had been a contestant on the baking show, I would have been immediately sent home.

I went to bed, dreading taking the cake to the event. During the night, I had a dream that I had to submit my cake for a contest. The ladies running the contest took my cake and said it was nice. When I went to see it on the judging table, they had taken one of the houses, and placed it on a new cake they had baked. They topped this new cake with a fondant sculpture of a family. The cake, I had supposedly made, had a ribbon attached – it had won a prize. I woke up at this point and thought I should not take my cake; I should start over. Andrew convinced me to take it.

Reluctantly, I went to the coffee break event with my cake. Everyone was gracious and said it looked great. When you surround yourself with kind people, the world is a much better place. They even ate the cake and declared it good. All I could see was a disaster.

Bill and Mary Murphy, standing next to me, were founder of Habitat 25 years ago. The others are current board members.

Someday, I may learn, but in the meantime here are my lessons. 1. Just because it is on the internet does not mean I should attempt it, or at least I should be aware of my limitations. 2. Instagram worthiness is all in the eyes of the beholder – what was a catastrophe to me still produced an Instagram moment. Which reminds me of the chicken, it looked so good in the photos, but it wasn’t really. Which brings me to my final lesson. 3. Don’t believe everything you see.

How will I apply these lessons, I am not sure. At the moment I am trying to paint Andrew’s portrait in oil paints, because I watched an interesting YouTube video, so I don’t really have time to think about life lessons. Real life is fun.

Happy 25th Anniversary to Habitat Newburgh!

Video courtesy of Aria Valdez