Skip to main content

A CAKE STORY

Or as this should be subtitled: My most recent culinary disaster.
Today I post about cake.
had to make a cake for a thing, and being as occasionally cakes I have baked have turned out okay - I've been making a mess in kitchens for a while now - I planned on making this one the night before. 
I  had been thinking for days about what to make, had consulted books and much on-line surfing, and had decreed it would be none of the usual ones like boring banana, carrot, or chocolate cakes. Nothing wrong with those at all, except banana which is rather meh, but it was time to do something different.
I decided to go with a vanilla themed wonder. 
So there I am the night before, making this thing, creaming the butter and the castor sugar (note, no substituting basic margarine or normal sugar for this wonder) and it creamed up all nice and fluffy as per the instructions. 
Then I added in the eggs and all of a sudden, it started to go a bit weird. As in, the previously creamed fluffy, soft, buttery-sugary goodness went a bit hard in bits. The butter appeared to solidify randomly. This was quite mysterious, and clearly wrong, but I'd already half made the thing. It was too late to back out.
So I soldiered on and finished, and stuck the cake in the oven. 
I checked on it, as one does, and noticed it did not appear to be rising all that much but appearances can be deceiving and let's face it - there wasn't a lot I could do now. 
Then, when I started to smell burning, I whipped the thing out.
Well.
It was one of those moments when you just look at it a while, perplexed, and think... what the...?
What is this thing?
It had barely risen.
There were clearly burnt bits somewhere.
But not only this, there was butter, as in liquid butter, bubbling around the edges.
And even worse, it would not come out of the tin and when I finally did get it out of the tin, I had to use sharp utensils to remove it.
And even more worse, it had little holes in it.
And when I tasted it - well, honestly? I did not know what I was tasting. I really don't.
So by now, its well after nine o'clock and I had promised I would deliver a cake the following morning.
People.
It is moments like these you do what you should have done in the first place, and there is always the one cake, the one cake that truly never fails and so I did that one.
I made a second cake, a version of the Destitute Gourmet's really easy chocolate cake, late at night, again with the butter and the eggs (thank you chickens, you lovely, pecking, ungrateful feathered wonders) and this cake rose amazingly, it looked stunning, it came out of the tin, and there were no burnt bits.
The only dilemma was that I didn't really know what it was going to be like.  I couldn't really try it and take a test piece out. For home use, this would not be a problem. There is nothing that copious quantities of icing can't disguise (except the previous disaster which was beyond repair) and icing is really good at disguising the discreet cut where the test piece is taken from. But I could not do it in this case.
I had to wait until it was sampled.
The next morning, when the time duly came, I do confess that as I saw the first piece being taken, I had to momentarily ignore the person talking to me so I could watch this other person, to see if there were any notable reactions to eating the cake, either way.
Oh, the relief, the joy.
They liked my cake! They really liked my cake.
Later, I partook.
People.
It was not half bad.
In fact, it was pretty good. As we like to say around here, it would have kept me in the competition.
Maybe, if I could be so bold, it could have even won it.
Thus all was saved - well rather, I was saved - and the OBVIOUS conclusion to draw from all this late night drama (which wasn't too bad with the first cake, because the rugby was on the radio) is - make what you know. Don't be a dick and try anything new at the last minute.
Notes on the cake recipe: It called for skim milk and I don't know what difference skim milk would have made as I did it with non-skim, and it was just fine. In fact, it was better than fine. I am not exaggerating to say it was amazing, and big, and worthy of any event. Here's the link again to the version of the Destitute Gourmet, Sophie Gray's, chocolate cake. The only thing I would add is it says 4-6 servings and my mind is boggling at that, surely a misprint, and it says U.S. measurements but I just used NZ.


Popular posts from this blog

Wet weather

It is starting to get cooler, praise be. There was a heap of rain one day this week, and by the time I got to work I was damp, to put it mildly. Soaked is overstating it but uncomfortably wet. Have you ever tried to dry off your trousers with a hair dryer?  I would have been there forever! If only, I thought, I had a spare anything at work, like a skirt even, but no. Nothing to change into. There was only a pair of pantyhose in case I ripped them, although I had stuffed spare socks and boots in my bag so I could have dry feet at work. It is worth noting that the very next day I went to work, I had completely forgotten that thought about spare clothes altogether and did not take spare anything for future weather events. In fact, I only remembered as I was thinking about writing this blog post. Hopeless. Given I’m trying to keep up my walking part-way to work to get in a good 40 minutes/steps, I should take along spare clothes to keep in my locker just in case. It really was uncom...

My latest obsession

 I have recently been a bit obsessed with the practice of junk journalling. Junk jouraling! I love it so far. Its been around a few years and seems to have taken over a bit from from the scrapbooking of yore, but the thing I like about it is you use up all your stuff that is lying around. You can use all your rubbishy bits and pieces of paper and things. I like the tutorials of a lady called Leah with a channel called Thrifty Day , and I've had a go at it and I kind of really like doing it. Sometimes I feel a bit out of sorts (I blame hormones... or perhaps it is, rather, the lack of them!) and so I decide to cut stuff up and stick it on a page and I feel better. Therapeutic! I also think that because it is play and there are no rules and you can be as messy as you like, and start again if the page looks like utter rubbish, well, it is just so good for you. It's like being a kid and let's face it... we got to do all the cool stuff when we were kids. Why not , now we're ...

An old post

This is a blog I wrote for a now defunct pop culture site I used to contribute to, some years ago.   A friend was reading some fiction I’d written the other day and after telling me what she did like about it, commented, “But you’re no Jane Austen.”   The only Jane Austen I have read is “ Emma .” and it was read under duress at university. I consider myself a person of not massively low intelligence, but it took three reads to get my head around it. Interestingly, that paper was not only my first and only complete Jane Austen experience, but my first and only experience of analysing English literature. I did get an A but not without suffering a degree of depression as a result. Yes, I gained an appreciation for some things (Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnets, oh my gosh!) but analysing Emily Dickinson was enough to sap the will to live right out of me. Fortuitously, at the end of that semester, I saw the movie Stargate on TV,  and promptly un-enrolled myself fr...