Happy Birthday to Me!

This year was a big birthday number for me. The big two zero. A pair of decades. Something without a "teen" at the end.

I dreaded it all year.

In my mind, turning 20 sucked. It signaled the end of my childhood, because there is almost no way to justify still calling yourself a kid once your age no longer ends in "teen." (All the way through age 19 I refused to allow anyone to call me an adult.)

But on my birthday I got my closure. It was a bittersweet farewell, but my childhood and I gracefully parted ways. I said goodbye and dulled the melancholic end by throwing the best cake party ever.

 

My one stipulation for my birthday this year was that my friends allow me to bake my own cake. Now, knowing my somewhat tragic caketastrophic past, I was a little worried that I would make myself cry on my birthday from another cake upset. However, partly due to my apartment's culinary restraints (I own no 9-round pans, hand beaters, or candy thermometer...sigh) and partly due to my stress preventative measures (namely choosing and easy recipe), my cake turned out quite well!

I felt warmed from the inside as I sat around my coffee table with several of my good friends. There was laughing and smiling, awkward introductions and people trying to remember names, and many Happy Birthdays wished.

Sitting back for a moment, I reflected upon how great 20 really was. I have amazing friends that care about me, a roommate that is like a sister, an apartment I love, and even a really cool job. Thinking about all of this, I realized that all of these things are cool things about being an adult, not a kid. I'd never have a roommate in high school or be able to say that I rented my own apartment. I realized that I was excited for my adult life.

And then, of course, there was the cake. It was moist and flavorful, slightly dense but in the most delicate way possible, and satisfying in that homemade kind of way. While nervous about the frosting ("after all", I wondered, "how can sour cream make a good cake frosting?"), it turned out to be one of the most flavorful and creamy frostings I've ever encountered. Unlike a lot of frostings, the sweetness of this one was understated and allowed the chocolate (rather than the sugar) to take center stage, complimenting the subtle cake base with a degree of expertise.

All in all, out of the 20 I've had so far, this birthday definitely was the best, and the cake comes highly recommended, too.

For the recipe, please visit Smitten Kitchen. The source of my stress-free cake and countless hours of admiration. Thanks for the great birthday recipes, Deb!

Cake-tastrophe Part 2

After my homemade chocolate cake disaster, I thought that the universe was too nice to allow for anymore mishaps in the kitchen for a while. However, I still took extra precautions when I made my store-bought cake mix. I wasn't taking any chances - I oiled my pans really well and double checked everything from measurements to the oven temperature.

Apparently that wasn't enough.

Baking the cakes went fine, but once they were cooled and I tried to take them out of their pans, they wouldn't budge. I started panicking so I shook and shook and shook the pan (looking back, this probably wasn't the best strategy... Scratch that. It definitely wasn't the best strategy). The cake finally gave into my aggressive shakes, but in retaliation, it came out in two pieces: the outside, and the middle. Ughhhhhh.

The other pan wasn't much better, but it was all that I had to work with, given that the birthday party was in T-minus 4 hours. I decided that with the aid of more frosting than was possibly decent, I would try to construct my dinosaur cake.

After the first layer of pink frosting was applied, my mutant dinosaur looked like it had some prehistoric skin disease, because the crumbs from the cake mixed with the frosting. Grrreat, my brother was going to have a cake that looked like a sickly animal.

I hadn't given up hope quite yet, though. I remembered reading in the Joy of Cooking that if you stick the cake in the fridge for a while and then add more frosting, the crumbs will stick to the first layer (the crumb layer), and leave the second one clean. I tried this, and it worked like magic. I was in awe of the power of a crumb layer, and my diseased dino only looked slightly afflicted now - definitely good enough to serve at a 5-year-old's party.

I used the fondant I made from scratch to make the eyes and spikes, and in the end, my brother loved it. It may not have been the cake I was expecting when I first conceptualized it, but I was still pretty gosh darn proud of my effort.

Cake-tastrophe Part 1

Yesterday was my 5-year-old brother's birthday and, being the enthusiastic baker that I am, I volunteered to make the birthday cake. My brother told me he wanted a dinosaur cake, but not just any dinosaur cake - he wanted a pink dinosaur. It made my day when he said that.

I decided to make a chocolate devil's food cake from scratch, and then shape it into a dinosaur and cover it with pink frosting. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, let's just say that the beautiful dinosaur I had envisioned was never quite realized, and it took many, many tears to get the mediocre final result. I never understood why someone would cry over their baking disasters, but I can fully say that now I completely empathize with anyone frustrated to the point of tears.

For my first attempt, I chose a recipe from a cookbook that called for buttermilk and cake flour. Seeing how I had neither, I found substitutions that seemed legit - regular milk plus lemon juice for the buttermilk (so it would curdle), and all-purpose flour minus a few tablespoons for the cake flour. I think that these two things combined are what contributed to the disaster...

*Warning, the following images contain horrific views of mangled cake.*

As you can see, the cake didn't rise. Instead, it caved in halfway through baking, but still decided to spill over the sides. Pieces dripped into the abyss of the oven's depths, burned, and made the whole house smell like burnt chocolate. Lovely.

Even at this point, I had hope (feel free to start laughing at my bright-eyed optimism anytime now). I let the cakes cool in the pans, certain that even though they looked ugly, they could be salvaged and turned into a dinosaur cake with the help of copious amounts of frosting. When I turned them out onto a plate, however...

...they looked like a pile of mud. What should have been the height of a two-layer cake instead resembled a mud-pie that my brother would make in the backyard. Yeah... definitely no way that I would be able to turn that into a dinosaur.

I finally resorted to trudging down to the store and buying a boxed cake mix (the baker inside me died a little), and that turned into a whole other cake disaster (stay tuned for Part 2 tomorrow).

The one good thing from all of this is that my flop cake tastes delicious. It's so chocolaty and rich that it's already halfway gone, despite its ugly appearance. This experience definitely showed me that I still have quite a way to go on my baking journey, but it's a lesson I'm glad I learned. I guess I'll just have to try again for the next birthday cake, and hopefully that one will go a little better.

Brown Sugar Pound Cake

Personally, I find that using dessert recipes that claim to be "light" is a bit amusing - it seems like a complete oxymoron. Normally, this just results in an underwhelming product with nearly all the calories of a non-"light" sweet. However, this dessert surpassed any expectations I had for it, given its origins (a Cooking Light cookbook). 

I admit that I chose it because I was desperate - the only cookbooks I have available to me are severely lacking in the sweets department, and I was just too lazy to print something out from online. (Yes, the printer is a mere 15 feet away from the computer, but this should clue you in to just how sloth-like I am during summer vacation.) 

Anyhow, I picked up the cooking light book and was pleased to find the Brown Sugar Pound Cake recipe: it looked nearly as unhealthy as regular pound cake, and the book's writers claimed it was a staff favorite, so I decided to give it a go.

It was simply delectable.

I can't say I was expecting much, mostly I thought it would taste like a regular pound cake with a slightly darker flavor due to the brown sugar. What I got instead was a cake that was rich and creamy, and tasted like caramelized maple syrup. So. Gosh. Darn. Good.

So please, for the love of all things pound cake, try this recipe. You won't be disappointed.

Recipe:

Adapted from Cooking Light Annual Recipes 2001

3 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup butter, softened

2 cups packed light brown sugar

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

3 large eggs

1 cup fat-free milk

1 tablespoon powdered sugar (optional)

1. Preheat oven to 350 F. Position oven rack to lower third of oven.

2. Coat a 10-inch loaf pan with cooking spray and then flour all sides. (The original recipe uses a 10-inch tube pan, but I found that the loaf pan worked fine if you don't have a tube pan available.)

3. Combine flour, baking powder, and salt in a medium-sized bowl, stir well. Beat butter in a large bowl at medium speed until light and fluffy. Gradually add brown sugar and vanilla, beating until well-blended. Add eggs, 1 at a time, beating well after each addition. Add flour mixture to sugar mixture alternately with milk, beating at low speed, beginning and ending with flour mixture.

4. Spoon batter into prepared pan. Bake at 350 F for 1 hour 20 minutes or until a wooden toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool in pan 10 minutes of a wire rack; remove from pan. Cool completely on wire rack. Sift powdered sugar over top of cake. (If using a tube pan, reduce cooking time to 1 hour 5 minutes)