Birthday Celebrations, Part Deux

This week, we celebrated N’s birthday, which, of course, required cake.

Her favorite is yellow cake with chocolate frosting. Given our busy lives, she very kindly said, “If you want to use a mix, it’s okay with me.”

Let me give you a little background on that. I have probably used one cake mix in the last twenty years. It’s not that I think they’re bad. I grew up on cake mix cakes. My mom made wedding cakes with mixes and guests swore they were from scratch.

It’s just that I tend to not have a cake mix in the house when I want to bake a cake. But I usually have all the component ingredients. If you think about it, most people do. Flour, sugar, eggs, butter, vanilla, salt baking powder and milk.

When it came to baking night, I still had not gotten a cake mix, but I certainly had all those items in my kitchen. So scratch it was.

Since I don’t have a favorite yellow cake recipe, I went searching. I was very interested in the recipes that called for buttermilk, but I didn’t have that. Nor did I have sour cream. But I’ll be trying those cakes at a later date.

What I landed on was this.

Yes, Martha Stewart.

Say what you want…the woman knows her stuff.

The cake is simple. Butter and sugar creamed together. Eggs and vanilla beaten in. Flour, baking powder and salt added alternatively with milk. Thick batter poured into two 8” rounds and baked for 35 minutes.

So simple. So easy to screw up. :o)

I didn’t really totally screw it up. But because I’m currently in the middle of a season of Top Chef: Just Desserts, I’m a bit more critical of my baking right now.

The cake was a little bit dry. But it was totally my fault. It needed a couple of minutes less in the oven and it would have been perfect. But it did have that wonderful butter flavor, delicate and rich. I will definitely be using this one again.

Now, I do have a favorite chocolate frosting recipe. It’s in the old McCall’s cookbook that my mom had. The flavor of this chocolate frosting is really unparalled. But it is complicated. You have to melt the chocolate, let it cool, cream the butter and sugar, add the chocolate, add the egg (yes, I said egg), beat it over a bowl of ice water to get it to the right consistency. If you are in a hurry or not meticulous, you can fuck this mother up. This is not something the middle-aged mother of a toddler should attempt, especially on a school night .

So I went hunting again. And I found this from a food blog called Savory Sweet Life. You have to scroll to the bottom of the page to get to the recipe.

What intrigued me about this recipe was the salt. It’s a pretty basic chocolate frosting recipe, but then it had salt. I knew this would bring out the flavor of the cocoa, so I decided try it.

It is now my favorite chocolate frosting. It’s easy to make, it tastes wonderful. How can anyone argue with that combination?

There is an option to use either vanilla or almond extract. I used vanilla. I’m not all that fond of almond flavoring in things. It is so easy to over do. And it wasn’t the right application here. But I think I will try it at some point. This frosting was tasty enough that I think it would be fun to play around with. Some cinnamon and cayenne, maybe?

In the final analysis, however, what matters is not whether I used cake flour or all purpose, whether I used almond or vanilla extract. What matters is how it tastes.

Well, the birthday girl rated it “awesome”. And that’s what’s important to me. :o)