Pen Pal!

I love to get "reader emails" although that is a rare event. Well, back in early December I received an email from a reader in Malaysia, named Deepa. How fun! She had been researching spiral cakes and came across this post, my nephew Crew's 2nd birthday Cars cake. The existing instructions on carving the spiral weren't clear (and it didn't help that I hadn't taken any pictures during the carving process) so I prepared this little diagram and emailed it back to her:

About a week later she sent me pictures of the cake she made for her godson. Just look at how CUTE that turned out! Her work is SO good and clean and she even made the cars out of fondant! She told me that she had only covered plain round cakes with fondant twice before she'd made this one. She's a natural with fondant!

We exchanged many more emails over the course of several weeks; she shared with me her recipe for from-scratch cake that she uses that is strong enough to support the weight of fondant, and I learned that cake mixes are very expensive in Malaysia because they're imported, so nobody uses them. Deepa sounds lovely and is a young mother of 3 who finds cake decorating to be therapeutic. I understand that completely!

I had such fun writing back and forth with a new friend; I know the internet has been around for a long time now but I still marvel at how it seems to make the world so much smaller.