Honors Banquet Cake: Because of the poor, dim lighting in the banquet hall, pictures just don't do this cake justice. I created this cake for the 2002 Honors Program Banquet at the University of Puget Sound, at which I was being honored as a graduating senior. The theme, dreamed up by my friend Kristin Amberg (who coordinated the banquet) and myself, was Dante's Divine Comedy, which every honors student at UPS reads during his or her freshman year. With this in mind, I set upon the task of designing a cake based on my favorite third of the immense poem, the Inferno.

I immediately knew what kind of cake I wanted to make: a Heaven and Hell Cake, which is my favorite desert at From the Bayou in Tacoma. The cake is alternating layers of angel's food and devil's food cake filled with peanut butter cream cheese mousse and coated in chocolate ganache. Not only is this cake DELICIOUS (yes, the all-caps are necessary; it's that good), but it also fit the theme perfectly: devil's food for the Inferno, peanut butter mousse for the Purgatorio, and angel's food for the Paradisio, wrapped up in chocolate as delectable as Dante's words.

I found a recipe online for the version they serve at the restaurant, and then I set to work doing practice tests of the recipe. These tests turned out to be incredibly valuable, because whoever wrote the recipe down managed to get both the baking temperatures and the baking times entirely wrong. In the end, I also added blood red, Irish cream-flavored buttercream frosting to the mix, which was inspired by a "research trip" that Kristin and I took to From the Bayou (which the Honors Program kindly paid for), where they had started serving the cake with Irish cream whipped cream.

I played around with several designs for the cake, but finally ended up settling on what you see here: calligraphy in blood red and gold, quoting the most famous line from the Comedia: "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."

All in all, it was an incredible first experience at making a large cake for someone who was actually paying me to make the cake. In retrospect, the project was a rather ambitious one for someone with my level of experience at the time: the recipe was not as simple as most of the cakes I had made in the past, involving many more components than a cake that just has one flavor of cake, filling, and icing, and I had never made a tiered cake with ganache before.

In the end, the cake was an extreme hit. One of my classmates kept stopping me in the halls to thank me for making the cake, saying it was the most incredible cake she had ever eaten (I agreed at the time, though since then I've fallen in love with my wedding cake). The Honors Program secretary kept relaying complements, and I could swear that one of my professors raised my grade in that class completely on the merits of the cake.