Sunday, August 19, 2007

Happy birthday Melissa!

Yesterday I celebrated one of my dear friend's birthday. We started off the day with some ladies golf at a public course where we could go as slow as we wanted to (we are pretty bad), then a divine dinner at Canteen (side note: go to Canteen, the food is just delicious and the service is among the best in SF), and then we went to a bar to meet up with the larger crowd of celebrators. With all the planning that went into making the event special, I was most worried about the cake that she asked me to bake.

I don't bake, or at the least, I don't bake very well. Every layer cake I have ever made is terribly lop-sided and not very tasty. But for the first time, I had some success. The layers were fairly even in size and cooked flat on the top. The icing job looked pretty good. The cake was moist and light.
Some of the success was due to finally owning some quality baking equipment, an accurately and evenly heated oven, and following the instructions extremely carefully. She requested a chocolate cake, chocolate icing, with some fruit additions. So I dug out my The Buttercup Bake Shop Cookbook and set to work. I chose a milk chocolate layer cake with milk chocolate butter cream icing. As a special treat, I iced the middle layer of the cake with organic strawberry jam and topped the cake with strawberry halves and toasted almonds. Perhaps the decorations could have been a little more stylish or even gold in color in keeping with color scheme of the fiesta. But for my first cake success, I am not going to worry about such little details.

Perhaps the most harrowing of all, the cake even made up and down the steep hills of San Francisco without any damage. Thank you to my trusty cake holders!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Absolutely the most perfect, tasty, beautiful cake ever! Everyone thought it was professional. I said, YES! Professional Alice, Duh!

Way to help me kick off a new decade. I suspect my 30s will be full of more perfect desserts. ; )