Easter Lamb Cake

When I started this cake experiment my mother-in-law brought over her grandmother's cast-iron lamb cake mold. She told me the story about her grandmother making this cake for every Easter table, an Easter tradition that even my husband remembered.  The lamb always looked nice and was surrounded by fake grass and jellybeans the problem was the the cake was inedible -- much too dry for anyone to enjoy.  My guess would be that great-grandma baked the cake on Thursday and frosted over the course of the next few days and then because it was too large to fit in the fridge with all of the other Easter food it was left out over multiple nights.  By the time Easter Sunday came the cake had dried out.

The tradition sounded so ideal and being a sentimental gal I was happy to recreate it.  However in the months that the cake mold sat high atop my kitchen cupboards it looked down at me almost as if it were laughing at me.  The cake mold knew that I would struggle to figure out how best to make it, what cake to use and the frosting and then there was the decorating!  Ugh.  I looked many times at Google's images of Easter lamb cakes.  Lamb cakes laughed at me in my sleep. To be perfectly honest the lamb cakes flat-out creeped me out!

After much research I decided that I would bake the cake in two separate halves.  Our cake mold did not have a tester hole as some of the other vintage ones did but it did have the loops to tie the mold together to bake as one.  However, without the cake tester hole how would I know that the cake was done.

I also decided on carrot cake.  Carrot cake had less of a chance of drying out and was dense enough to stand up to the frosting.  Then because I had no idea how much frosting I would need and knew that it needed to have the perfect consistency I opted for Duncan Hines cream cheese frosting.  For canned frosting cream cheese is the way to go.  Chocolate and vanilla frosting always takes too sugary and fake for me but cream cheese seems to stand up to homemade cream cheese frosting rather well, in my opinion.

When I took the baked cake out of the mold I had to make a cut on each side so that they were flat and could be "glued" together with frosting.  The neck was a little jostled so I added a toothpick for support.  I laid down a bit of frosting on my platter so that the cake would be better equipped to stand.  And the frosting began.

I was almost done when the neck of lamby started to topple!  Holy moly!  I used my two fingers to hold poor lamby together as my husband opened the fridge for me.  I propped lamby up with a container of alfredo and hoped for the best!

I thought for sure that when I opened the fridge the next morning lamby would be lamby-mess in my refrigerator but he did survive the night.

The family all talked about the tradition they remembered and while lamby still creeped me out, he tasted good!