Birthdays and boredom (where would I be without alliteration?!)

I am bored. Very very very bored. I have much to do but it's all Big and Scary and requires actual brain power so I'm trying to ease into it. Also the internet has failed me miserably today. I have looked at all my normal sites and there is nothing there to sufficiently interest me (despite this whole NOTW drama which does interest me, but about which I have already read too much).

So, since I have a desperate need to do anything other than what I should be doing (which also includes walking to the shops to buy a lottery ticket - but I can't be arsed getting dressed and doing my hair etc etc. Every possibly choice of activity seems to involve too many other requirements today. My laziness knows no bounds), I thought I would reinstate the 'mighty' blog, have a whinge and talk about the cake I made myself for my 30th birthday this weekend.

On Friday (the eve of my birth), I felt like baking. I don't love cake, and could easily endure a birthday without one, but as you know I do quite enjoy the baking process, and that's what I felt like doing. I originally set out intending to try and replicate an infamous birthday cake that Andrew once bought me (for my 26th birthday...a birthday which fell a week before my original PhD submission deadline and which ended with me hysterically sobbing over the realisation that, no matter how hard I worked, I simply wasn't going to get 30,000 words written in a week). That cake was a raspberry white chocolate mousse cake and it was amazing. I could have eaten the lot. It was layers of light sponge cake sandwiched with a white chocolate and raspberry mousse and topped with a sort of berry glaze/jelly thing. In the end on Friday, it was the glaze/topping thing that stopped me trying to make that cake. But thinking about it made me realise that I fancied something with a berry vibe. I came across a recipe for something called a Pink Lady cake which looked rather festive. It was made with strawberries and had cream-cheese icing - all rather tasty sounding. My other half, though, doesn't much care for cream cheese icing and since he'd eat the vast majority, I thought I'd go with chocolate icing. And then I thought that raspberries would go better with chocolate than strawberries and so my 4 tier raspberry chocolate layer cake was born.

I used this recipe as my starting point: http://smittenkitchen.com/2008/10/pink-lady-cake/

Instead of the strawberries, though, I first pureed 600gms of fresh raspberries (they being in season here at the mo) and then sieved those to remove the seeds. Rather conveniently, that produced a cup and a half of berry puree.

When making the cake (which, by the way, is a freaking enormous batter! My Magimix couldn't cope - there was pink batter flying all over the place), I changed some of the instructions because they just didn't seem to make sense to me. For instance, I added the milk to the main batter rather than mixing it with the egg whites. I am far from an expert baker, but my baking instincts railed against the idea of trying to whip egg whites that have dairy added to them. Just didn't compute. I also may have inadvertently added a LOT more food colouring than was strictly necessary. The kitchen was splattered in red batter, as was I, and it all looked like a grizzly My Little Pony murder scene.

I persevered, though, even when the batter wouldn't fit into the first bowl and had to be decanted into the large, hideous plastic blue fruit bowl that was the only vessel I could fit it in. At this point every single bowl, utensil and surface in the kitchen was covered in fluro crimson batter. Deep, calming breaths. The batter smelt wonderful though - fresh and berry-scented, and when I licked the many spoons I had dirtied in the making, it tasted delicious. Sort of like melted raspberry icecream. What's not to like?!

The baking process also seemed to go well (given the whole Magimix/bowl/batter explosion thing, I figured the cake with its 8 egg whites and 5.5 tsp of baking powder would overflow out of the pans and into the bottom of my less-than-pristine oven. It did not. A small coup). The cakes looked pretty good when they came out - a less terrifying shade of pink, and perfectly edible. Progress.

Once they were cooled, I made an enormous vat of chocolate butter frosting (running out of cocoa along the way - I tried to make up for it by blitzing into the mixture some dark chocolate. This did not work and made the icing look like I hadn't sifted anything. Which I hadn't, of course, but it still wasn't a good look), and started the layering process. I split both cakes in half and towered them up with icing between them. Naturally I hadn't made the pieces uniform before doing this so my stacked cake had a rather trapezoid look about it, but not to worry, I thought! I'll just keep coating the thing in icing - no one will notice! Of course, despite using half a pound of butter in making my icing, I didn't have quite enough, so it was spread rather thinly in places.

But, despite all of this, the cake was a thing of relative beauty at the end. A giant towering beast of a cake with a chirpily blasphemous comment piped on top. I was so proud. Wouldn't you be?!

We lugged the beast with us to our friends' place on Saturday night, thinking it would make a delicious ending to a wonderful birthday. I should have known better. American recipes almost never work out for me, and this was another of those times. It was a thing of visual glory, this cake, but it tasted rather a lot like eating pink playdoh. In fact, if someone told you they'd made it in their Playdoh kitchen, I don't think you'd have been surprised. I'm not sure what went wrong to be honest - perhaps I tried too hard? Perhaps cakes just shouldn't be fluro pink (because, let's remember, this is not the first fluro pink cake incident I've had)? Perhaps raspberries are denser than strawberries. Perhaps the milk should have been whisked into the egg whites (though I remain v sceptical about that argument)? Perhaps blaspheming in icing wasn't the smartest karmic move?

We will probably never know. Alls I can say at this point is, I hope to god that my lovely friends' wedding cake (which I have volunteered to make - arggh) tastes much more like baked goods than childrens' novelty modelling substances.

Happy Birthday to Moi.