It's My Birthday!!

Ok, so technically my birthday isn’t until the 12th, but hubby was out of town this week, so I decided to make my cake a little early.  Besides, who wants to spend their birthday in the kitchen?  Now, ordinarily I leave birthday cakes to the professionals, but this year I decided, not only to bake myself a cake, but to go the whole nine yards.  I made real Italian buttercream, and even bought pastry bags and piping supplies to do a few decorations.  Next time you have a birthday or special event, give making your own cake a try. 

Here’s what you’ll need for the cake:

¾ cup butter (1 ½ sticks)
1 ½ cups sugar
2 eggs
1 egg yolk
2 ½ cups flour
1 cup buttermilk
1 Tablespoon vanilla
½ teaspoon almond extract (optional)

All of your ingredients must be at room temperature before you start.  Sorry, I didn’t manage to get an ingredients picture for the cake.  I will tell you to preheat your oven to 350°, though.  Also, you need to line 2, 8 inch round pans with parchment and butter the sides of the pans.  To see how to cut parchment to the proper size, I showed how in my chocolate cake post. 

Throw your softened butter into a mixing bowl. 

Beat it for a good minute or two so it becomes nice and soft and fluffy, then pour in the sugar and beat for another 3 or 4 minutes.

Add the eggs and vanilla. 

Be sure to save the extra egg white so you can use it in the buttercream later.

I know, eggs are supposed to be added one at a time… yeah, I didn’t.  Just make sure you mix until they’re completely incorporated. 

Next, sift your dry ingredients into a separate bowl and whisk them together. 

Add ⅓ of the dry ingredients. 

Mix until incorporated, making sure to scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl.  Pour in half of the room temperature buttermilk. 

Repeat.  You may notice that the mixture looks a little lumpy or curdled after the liquid additions. 

Don’t worry about that.  As long as you end with dry ingredients, it will smooth out beautifully, which you can see here.  This picture also shows why you have to scrape down the bowl frequently. 

Now divide the batter evenly between the two pans. 

Into the 350° oven for 35-40 minutes. 

So, apparently, my oven cooks a little on the hot side.  That is what causes cakes to crack on top.  Oh well, that’s what icing is for, right?  Now, cool the cakes for 30 minutes in the pans, then remove them and allow them to cool completely.  Once they’ve cooled, drop them back into their pans, cover them, and refrigerate for at least a few hours.  I left them overnight. 

Now to start on the frosting.  I knew I wanted some of my buttercream to be pink, but as usual, I would not be using artificial colors.  Instead, I used pomegranate juice. 

Unfortunately, you can’t just add it as it comes.  Adding too much liquid to your frosting will make it break.  We have to cook it down.  Easy enough.  Just pour it into a pan and boil it for a while, stirring occasionally.  As it cooks down, you’ll start to see larger bubbles forming and stacking on top of each other.  That’s a good sign that much of the water has cooked off. 

It will be very hot, so pour it into something very heat safe, and make sure it’s resting on top of a towel or hot pad.  As you can see, from the 2 cups of juice, I ended up with about ¼ cup of colored syrup. 

Set that aside and we’ll start on the buttercream.  Now, since I had never made Italian buttercream before, I used a recipe I found on the interwebs.  That being said, next time I make it, I will change it up just a bit.  To me, it was a bit too rich and buttery, so I will try cutting the butter down to 2 cups instead of the 3 that are called for.  Since I’ve never made it that way and can’t guarantee it would turn out beautifully, I’ll give you the recipe I did make.  If you feel like experimenting, try it with 2 cups and let me know how it turns out.   

Here’s what you’ll need:

1 ¼ cups sugar
½ cup water
8 egg whites
⅓ cup sugar
3 cups butter (6 sticks… what?  It’s my birthday.)

Again, it is important that everything is room temperature. 

For separating all the eggs, I used Seeley’s tip and pulled out a third bowl.  Don’t forget the egg white you save from making the cake.   

See?  Perfectly separated. 

Save those yolks, 4 of them at least, and next week I’ll show you a great way to use them!  Now, onto the syrup.  Before you start, grab a little dish of ice cold water.  In a pan over medium low heat, stir together 1 ¼ cups sugar and ½ cup water.  When the sugar has mostly dissolved, increase the temperature to medium, continuing to stir constantly.  When it reaches a boil, put on a lid and set a timer for 3 minutes. 

Now back to the mixer.  The recipe I used called for 1 teaspoon of cream of tartar, but I didn’t have that, so I just added a little squeeze of lemon juice to the egg whites.  Feel free to do either, or neither.  Now, turn the mixer on high-ish.  When the egg whites become foamy and opaque, sprinkle the over the sugar while the mixer continues to run.

Soon, the mixture will become very opaque.  You want to be able to do this.

Hopefully, like me, you’re able to accomplish that in the 3 minutes you have while the lid is on the syrup.  When the timer goes off, remove the lid.  It should look about like this. 

With a clean spoon, drop a little of the syrup into the cold water. 

You should be able to gather it together into a ball, but it should flatten easily between your finger and thumb.

When you get to that point, turn off the heat and carry the pan over to the mixer.  When the syrup has stopped boiling, with the mixer running on medium high, begin to pour the syrup very slowly into the egg whites. 

Try to get the stream to fall between the side of the bowl and the whisk.  If the syrup gets on the cold metal, it will harden rather than mixing in.  Naturally a little of it will be thrown around by the whisk no matter what you do. 

When all the syrup is into the mix, it will be quite hot.  If you have a flexible ice pack on hand, go ahead and wrap it around the bowl.  I always keep a bag of cheap frozen peas on hand for just such an occasion.  They make the best ice packs, and you can get them really cheap.

You want the mixture to be just a little over room temperature, around 80°, then it’s time to start adding the butter.  Cut the butter into about 1 Tablespoon size pieces and add them one at a time while the mixer continues to run. 

Yes, it is going to take a while.  And when you finally get close to the end of your butter, this will happen and you’ll think you’ve killed the whole thing. 

Don’t panic, just keep going.  It’s going to turn into buttercream, and soon.  See?

Now, I wanted a layer of pink in the middle of my cake as well as pink borders and a few little flowers, so I took about a third of the icing out and added some of the pomegranate syrup.  See how thick it is?

Whisk it in to get the color you’re looking for.  I added about 1 ½ teaspoons to get a nice pastel pink. 

Ok, let’s put this cake together.  Cut the bottom cake in half. 

Top the bottom half with raspberry jam, leaving a small border around the edge.  Use something really good.  I used homemade. 

Put the top back on and plop on some of the pink buttercream.

Spread, again leaving a border.

Now for the second cake.  Since this one is going to be on top, I decided to level it out a bit so I’d have a flatter surface on the top of the cake. 

Cut that cake in half.  I missed the middle, so I put the thinner piece onto the cake next.  Top that one with raspberry jam like you did the first. 

Last, you want whatever is flattest facing up. 

Now for the white buttercream.  You want to do very thin layer on the whole cake.  This is called a crumb coat, and that’s exactly what it’s for.  It traps the crumbs.  Pop the whole cake into the fridge for 30 minutes, and give your feet and back a break.  Don’t refrigerate the rest of the buttercream, though.  It needs to remain spreadable. 

Now, I’m not going to teach you how to decorate a cake.  As I’ve already said, I’m no cake decorator.  You can find great videos on youtube, though.  Here’s what I did.  I coated the whole cake in an even-ish layer of buttercream.  Looks good enough to me. 

Then I just did a border around the top and bottom of the cake in pink, and a handful of easy flowers. 

Not perfection, but I don’t think it’s half bad for my first attempt.  Especially considering how artistically inept I am. 

It was a bit time consuming, but I really enjoyed doing it.  And really, what’s better than sitting down with a delicious, and mostly pretty, slice of cake and being able to say, “I made that!” 

What food do you usually leave to the professionals? 

Where's my cake?

I want to smash my face in it, cry, then have a nice long nap.

Why?

We're 1 today!!And that's what 1 year olds do on their birthday.

Well, technically tomorrow, but the party's today. One year olds have no clue that it's their birthday so it doesn't really matter when it happens. All they see is cake, lots of weird people, and shiney wrapping paper.

There are lots of weird people around here (we love our commenters, tell your friends) and are much too distracted by shiney things. My last attempt at cake was an epic fucking fail (don't worry, I'll post it soon so you can laugh and cringe too) so we're going to have to wait a couple weeks for Taneasha to make one.

When Taneasha told me we'd made it a whole year (see, totally oblivious, may as well be a toddler) and warned me it was closer to my post day than hers, my first thought was to do a "clip show" post, but she'd already done that to cover my ass over the holidays. Crap. Okay, fine. The first year is always full of firsts, new things learned, and first attempts at things that really need practice.

Here's what I've learned:

1) Preheat the fucking oven. This is where the shiney paper effect comes in. We get all excited about the prospect of making cookies; we sift, we cream, we add moar choklits! and then when we go to bake them, we have to sit for 15 minutes staring at a wall while the oven warms up. It's like a time out for naughty bakers.

2) Kitchen timers are your friend. When the recipe says bake the cookies for 13 minutes, they're not kidding. Granted there's a bit of leeway, but really, they don't need 17. Four minutes is a long time for cookies to be at 350 degrees. Plus, when you're trying to prove that it really is possible to make dinner in 20 minutes, it's nice to watch those last few seconds count down as you take your first bite.

3) Beginners luck is a fickle bitch. The first time I made hollandaise sauce (years ago) it came out awesome. I've never been able to make it quite the same since. But this is not always how things go. Sometimes it takes a couple tries to get a recipe right. Sometimes no matter how many times you try the recipe just won't come out right. Yes, there have been times when we've posted first attempts, but we've done it for a reason. We're here every week writing up recipes, acting like we know what we're doing, but really, we're just trying to feed ourselves and our families something other than cereal for dinner. Shit happens, some recipes suck (I fully expect that sometimes the stuff that works in our kitchens won't work in yours and that's okay). Sometimes you get it right on the first try, sometims you don't. Sometimes you never will. And if you don't, there's always cereal for dinner.

4) Tinfoil is the only thing that will stop guacamole from turning brown.

Taneasha here.  This looked like so much fun, I decided to jump in too.  Here are some things I've learned in our first year. 

1) Putting together a post will always take 3 times longer than you think it will.  I don't know how many times I've gone into the kitchen thinking, "Oh, this will only take me 30 minutes or so."  2 hours later, flour in my shirt and hair and butter all over the camera, I finally have the food cooked and the pictures taken... but haven't even started on picture editing and actual post writing. 

2) Don't make something for the first time for a post.  Ok, obviously I haven't really learned this because I still do it, but it's really not a good idea.  It has a habit of turning into chaos. 

3) Cooking is going to be messy.  There's just no way around it.  Almost without fail I'll need something from across the room while whisking batter.  Also without fail, I'll let the whisk rest against the side of the bowl, checking to make sure it's stable, but as soon as I turn my back, the thing falls out of the bowl, flinging batter much further than physics should allow.  Things are going to spill, drip, and boil over.  It just happens, and it's ok.   

Ok, back to Seeley.

There are also a couple things I'd like to post about again.

Chicken Picatta. This was a first attempt. I was totally winging it to the point that I didn't even know how much of each ingredient I used. I've made this a few times since and really want to post an actual recipe for it. Plus, it's way (like way) way better with basil than parsley.

Smoothies. While this wasn't a first attempt, it was a bit of a half-assed one. I want to do a bit more with them and show some of the actual fruit combinations that are tasty, rather than just telling you to dump a bunch of fruit in the blender for a while. But hey, at least it wasn't just cereal for dinner.

Pizza. I've shown you the quick and easy pita version, now I want to try the real thing. On real dough. With yeast. One of these days I'm going to make dough that actually rises. I swear I can feel the poor little yeasties dying. I kill them with my bare hands.

Well, I guess this did turn out to be kind of a clip show. But at least I can prove that I learned something in the last year. I sure didn't learn much calculus. No, seriously, someone show me how to take the partial deriviative of a multivariable function. Anyone? Bueller?

So tell us... what would you like to see us make in our second year?