Birthday Cake and Baking Mistakes

At our house, a cake baked is not just a receptacle for birthday candles, but a gift of love as well, and so, our birthday cakes are homemade ones.  They usually taste pretty good, offer an activity for creative hands and often provide a few laughs.  Who can say that about a bakery-bought birthday cake?

My trusty assistant adds just a teaspoon of vanilla… I hope.

We used our tried-and-true 1-2-3-4 Cake Recipe from Alice Waters’ Fanny at Chez Panisse, and as per my little helper’s request, we mixed up some turquoise frosting—turquoise is fast replacing pink as the color of choice for… just about everything.

Humorously enough, I started this post, thinking that this cake would bake and get put together just as easily as the Thunder Cake we made last month.  My cake, however, had other plans.
It mixed up just fine, thanks to the ol’ Scovil hand mixer and seemed to fluff properly when I folded in the egg whites.  In hindsight, however, I vaguely recall thinking that it might look a bit deflated.  But I carried forth anyhow.

Cake surgery and the creation of Franken-cake

I planned to fill it with strawberry jam for the very specific reason that it was what we had in the house.  At the end of April, even in Northern California, the local, in-season fruit selection is minimal.  Strawberries are your best (almost only) option, if you don’t want to be eating fruit that hopped on a plane to get to your local supermarket.  Kiwis are an option, but I don’t like them, so I feed them to everyone else in my family.  Babies ate their first kiwi today, as a matter of fact.  Fortunately, I loooooove strawberries.  I eat them for lunch, breakfast, dinner, snack and with my bedtime nightcap (herbal tea).  I try not to cry in July when they’re really too pale and dry to be delicious.  I am, however, easily placated by the arrival of peach season.

But anyhow, we made another cake.  And this time, I was going to try and make it pretty, too.  Not beauty pageant, high-maintenance gorgeous, but down-home pretty.  Think more Emma Stone and less Kim Kardashian.  Okay, great.  Now imagine that they are both birthday cakes…
And then my oven limitations and my baking abilities got into the mix with my pretty Hollywood Starlet fantasies and I ended up with Franken-cake.  For some reason, one of the cake pans decided not to cook her cake all the way through.  The other decided to sink in the middle like the Titanic in a sea of icebergs (and Leo DiCaprio when he couldn’t hold on to the wreckage).  It was a sad, sorry sight.  But I was not to be deterred.  I don’t toss food just because it’s ugly—unless of course, it’s ugly because of the gray-green fuzz growing on it.  So I performed a bit of surgery.  I cut off the good parts of the half-baked one and then cut the other in half, for a double half-layer cake—in other words, a single layer cake with jam in the middle.

Spreading the delicious turquoise frosting.

Decorating a cake as a team.

Post-confectionary surgery, we needed to frost the cake.  My trusty assistant determined that blue and just a bit of green to achieve the desired turquoise.  Only we didn’t have enough powdered sugar.  As I said before, we were determined to make this cake—it was my birthday cake, darn it, and I was not going to let a simple lack of powdered sugar keep me from my frosting.  Unfortunately, my neighbors are not the baking types, otherwise I would’ve had my five year-old trot over and beg a cup from them.  The technique is fun and old-fashioned, almost always reciprocated and a great way to get to know people.  But luckily, we now own a Vitamix (that’s another birthday story for another time) and I made, yes, made powdered sugar.
Thank you Vitamix and thank you, Internet.  Nifty, no?   So, after my trusty assistant came back to the kitchen after the Vitamix was done making noise, we mixed a little bit of pink and a bit more turquoise, with the pre-determined amount of food coloring.

Together, we decorated it with pink flowers (of course) and had a mini spelling lesson—that’s M-O-M-M-Y.

Happy Birthday to me.  🙂