The Unreal Meal

Remember that ice cream you’d get as a kid in the square container that had perfect stripes of chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry?  Wikipedia tells me that this Neopolitan ice cream was named in honor of its “presumed origins” in Naples, Italy.  I wonder if this stuff is still available today, and if so, has been renamed to reflect the often disingenuously PC culture in which we live?  Whatever the case, anytime that I think of combinations of chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry, I instantly think of Neopolitan ice cream.

Speaking of things that are tenuously rooted in Italian food history, I’ve recently been having conversations about spaghetti and meatballs with some coworkers.  One particular coworker is somewhat fixated on Italian foodstuffs (I can’t say that I blame him).  For about a month leading up to Christmas he (mostly jokingly) insisted that he wanted one of four things for his Secret Santa gift:  a 55″ or greater LCD tv, an xBox 360, Call of Duty – Modern Warfare 2, or spaghetti and meatballs.  No amount of lecturing on my part about how this is really an Italian-American dish and not authentic Italian cuisine would sway him.  In the end, two days before Christmas, we had our group gift exchange and his Secret Santa gave him a box of spaghetti and homemade tomato sauce and meatballs.  It was a huge hit.

After the new year, said coworker announced to us all that his birthday was at the end of January, and his list of gifts that he wanted remained largely unchanged.  This gave me an idea:  spaghetti & meatballs birthday cake.  A quick google search returned Ciao Chow Linda’s Spaghetti and Meatballs Cake.  I opted to do this for my friend, with just a couple changes:

• I used a boxed cake mix.  Please don’t judge — it had to be done in a hurry on a Thursday night, and because I’m not really a baker, sometimes my from-scratch cakes don’t turn out as well as I’d like them, whereas a box is really hard to muck up too much.
• I used the buttercream recipe from the side of the box of Domino’s confectioner’s sugar because it uses mildly less butter (I’m not sure that it’d really matter, mind you).
• I didn’t pipe my spaghetti with a piping bag.  Why, you ask?  Because I don’t own a piping bag.  In spite of the fact that I’ve posted cookies and marshmallows and other sweet treats here, baking isn’t really my niche, so I lack some of the more useful bits of baking equipment.  I tried using a plastic baggie with a hole cut in a corner (that’s how I drizzle chocolate on things as a general rule), but the buttercream was too thick and it kept springing leaks.  My solution was to use a potato ricer.  That worked better than I would have imagined.  If I were doing it again, though, I’d probably tape off half of the holes so that it doesn’t come out so thick.
• I used one jar of Smucker’s strawberry jelly and one of sugar-free strawberry preserves.  I would have used all normal strawberry preserves had the market near my apartment had them at all, but they didn’t.  I wanted preserves or jam so that there were chunks that looked like bits of tomato, but the sugar-free preserves have an unholy red/pink color to them.  As such, I mixed in the strawberry jelly which is really dark.  If I do it again, I’ll probably add a little red food coloring to try and mimic a more tomatoey color.
• The meatballs were outstanding, I thought.  The woman, Linda, from whom I lifted the recipe says that she’d change them the next time, but I thought they were really quite good: dense, chocolatey, and sweet.  The nuts in them really help give them texture to look like a real meatball.

This is definitely a fun project, not remotely hard, and easily done in advance (though I did it all in one sitting).  In the end, it took me about three hours, but that was hardly all active time, what with the baking and the cooling and everything.  I also made and ate dinner in the process.

The cake was a huge hit with the birthday boy, and everyone that had some loved it.  Of course, there are few things better than vanilla buttercream, strawberry jam, and chocolate “meatballs.”  Italian or no, it was delicious!

Spaghetti and Meatballs Cake