Let me eat cake.

Cake has never really been my thing. I would sell my right arm for a bag of crisps at the right moment, but I've never really yearned for cake. I enjoy making cakes and other baked goods, but I always have to give my efforts away. And yet...

Lately I've had the most ridiculous hankerings for cake.* In a rather shameful weekend not long past, I bought and ate an entire (small) carrot cake, and this week I've become fixated with the idea of an American 'white' cake - the type of frosted beasts you see on TV shows. They always look so good, and you know how much of a sucker I am for American foods (see, for eg., Pretzels and Cookies). So, I'm afraid I now need cake. I've had a relatively productive morning (having finished and submitted a paper as well as doing some tedious teaching-related admin), so I think that I deserve cake. I've earned it.**

But which cake to make? Apparently, to achieve a truly 'white' cake, you have to use vegetable shortening, but I don't have any and after the lard experience, I didn't really fancy it. Butter seems a much nicer option. I have a brilliant cupcake recipe from Magnolia Bakery in NYC which I know works, but I thought I'd try something different for this, and there seems to be two distinct schools in the world of American vanilla cake. There's a version where you make a meringue and fold that through the mix for extra oompf, and then there's a very weird sounding version which appears to rely on witch-craft, in which you mix milk and egg-whites together and then just blend them through the cake mixture without whipping. I haven't made either type of cake before, but the second version is just so intriguing that I sort of felt compelled to try it first. It's also the version that various (relatively reputable) baking bloggers RAVE about. "This is the best vanilla cake recipe ever", they cry! "You'll never need another recipe!". With such praise, I really had no choice but to try the witchy cake.

I was very careful in my weighing and measuring. I even followed instructions online for turning my plain flour (normal baking flour) into the requisite 'cake flour' which American recipes insisted upon. When the batter was finished, it did look, smell and taste like a "proper" cake, so into the oven it went.

This is the finished product (my icing efforts, much like my photography, need work...it's on my to-do list!)

The frosting wasn't quite behaving as I wanted it to, but it came out ok. We cut it after dinner (salmon curry with homemade naan) and I was really looking forward to it. A slice was cut...forks were poised...

And then...this. You can see already from the picture of the cut slice that things didn't quite pan out. It's not fluffy, it's not light, the crumb just looked, well, weird.

The taste was even worse. It was awful. Really really bad. Sort of glue-y and floury and just yuck. We couldn't eat it in the end - even the lad couldn't eat it, so you pretty much know it was a singularly bad cake.

All in all, a very disappointing day in the kitchen. There's nothing that pisses me off more than actually following a recipe closely, only to have it turn out horribly. I should have known witch-craft and cakes didn't mix. Next time, I'll go with the meringue version or stick with my tried and tested Magnolia cupcake recipe, but I think to redeem myself a bit, I might make a carrot cake today instead.




* Before you ask, no, I'm not pregnant. I just want cake.
**unlikely