Jessica's Food Life: back with cake.

Dear me,

I'm sorry I made you wait so long for the next post. In the meantime I've been discovering farmer's markets, eating kale, quinoa and beets. Three foods I'd never thought I'd eat in my life, let alone like.

But the sweets always figure in my life somehow. I was determined to make myself a birthday cake this year, an ambition I've always had but rarely follow through on. I usually bake cakes for friends on their birthdays, but when it comes to my own I just want to sit back and do nothing. Or cross my arms over my chest and pout, wondering why none of my friends take it upon themselves to bake me a cake. But I know, I know that I would prefer to eat my own cake. I think I'm habituated (is that a word) to my own baking just as I am to my own scent. I don't know the scent is there, though I'm sure it is, and therefore it sits just fine on me. In fact I'd say it suits me well. And so does my baking. I know what's going into my dessert, (i.e. I know how much butter, how little salt, etc) and somehow that makes me sure that I'll like it.

So for the big 3-0 I thought I'd bake a classic genoise from this cookbook. I added orange rind and lots of vanilla bean paste to make for an extra tasty sponge-like cake. I pictured it layered with a rich chocolate (homemade) buttercream frosting. But I wouldn't settle for anything less than perfect and when the two cakes came out of the oven but would not release from the non-stick pans that I had buttered, I knew I was in trouble. I managed to get one out OK, but the other one clung to the pan in odd patches leaving huge chunks in the cake when I finally got it out onto the rack. On top of that, I noticed the occasional speck of flour that hadn't mixed in to the batter properly. With two days before my birthday I sighed, called it a night and decided to make a new cake the following day.

Attempt number two was to produce a two layer chocolate chiffon cake from this book. The cake was one I had made 5 months earlier for a friend--with terrific results. While it looked picture perfect when removed from the oven, the taste wasn't well, chocolatey. I don't know what went wrong--could it have been the Sunny Select canola oil from Lucky's that I'd used? Or the year(s?) old Hershey's cocoa that had been sitting in my cupboard? I started beating myself up for not having refrigerated the cocoa, and immediately suspecting that as the reason behind why my cake tasted wrong. The 6 eggs that I used--no, make that 12 since I messed up the first crack around by spilling egg yolk into the whites--to make the orange buttercream frosting were well worth my time. The italian meringue-style buttercream was a hit. But the cake, cute and all as it looked, was kind of a bust.

But what of that genoise I'd snubbed the day before? I froze it, only to dig into it a couple of weeks later and promptly eat 1/3 of one layer straight out of the freezer. I kid not. And, it was delicious. Flour clumps and all. The remaining cake and 2/3 were put to use this weekend with a little help from semisweet chocolate chips and my roommate's confetti frosting a la Betty Crocker. I'm not sure how I feel about BC, but the cake, layered with apricot jam (a little grand marnier as well) turned out to be delicious. I shouldn't have doubted in the first place. But that was back when I was 29, not nearly as wise as I am now at 30.