Although this is not a cooking, or even a baking blog, I sometimes like to dream I'm a famous kitchen blogger. I don't seem to have gotten the Julie/Julia gene though, so I content myself with knitting. Nonetheless, I'm going to stray into kitchen territory with this post and show you all the cake I made for my second child's 19th birthday. He wanted a cake that was both chocolate and white (but not marble) with vanilla frosting.
He got this.
The secret to all good cakes, as I imparted to Ellie, who most decidely thought I had lost my mind, is using a recipe where you separate the eggs.
Adding whipped egg whites at the end to a custardy batter mixture produces light moist cakes. So I mixed up my white cake (actually a yellow cake recipe from The Joy of Cooking) and my chocolate cake (Devil's Food Cockaigne from the same book) and baked two white layers and a thick chocolate layer. The chocolate custard that went into the batter was a crowd pleaser, with spoon tasting all around called for.
The cake layers turned out perfectly.
The only thing left was to put the layers together using Pastry Cream filling that I had made the night before and then to crumb coat the cake with this delicious Caramel Icing, which went underneath the Boiled White Frosting you can see in the picture above after Teddy blew out the candles.
A cake like this is a day-long labor of love, but oh so much fun to make! I'm off to see if there is a slice left for a mid-afternoon snack.