Sunday, February 28, 2010

Not Pictured

I did some significant baking this month. I made my oldest nephew's birthday cake mid-month, which was delicious but kind of ugly. It was a three-layer yellow cake with strawberry glaze in the middle layers and a blueberry glaze on the top. The blueberry glaze, as you might imagine, was more gray than blue and might have been striking on a chocolate cake, but was rather blah on a golden cake. It was exactly what the birthday boy wanted so it was perfect. But not pretty.

I made some chocolate chip football cookies for the Superbowl, but I didn't post a picture since they looked identical to the ones I made last year.

I almost took a picture of the spinach pie I made last week. Homemade crust and everything. Maybe next time.

Saturday, February 06, 2010

Almost Classic Cake

Special Birthday Cake with Semi-Sweet Chocolate Buttercream frosting.
3/4 of the whole cake

I was asked to make a cake as the dessert for a fried chicken dinner. Since most of the attendees watch their sugar intake, I thought I'd try using the bag of Splenda for Baking that's been in my pantry for a while. (I called the 800 number to make sure it was still good. Turns out it never goes bad!) The cake wasn't as moist as I would have liked, but for a first attempt it was pretty good.

The frosting was outstanding. The recipe was a mix of Mrs. Millman's and semi-sweet chocolate buttercream. I used 12 ounces of chocolate chips (melted and cooled), a stick of butter (cold), 1 cup of powdered sugar, a little vanilla and some milk to thin it out.

I left a little bit of the cake unfrosted at the request of the host, but cut it out of the picture because it looked weird.