It's my first time baking a birthday cake for a friend celebrating her birthday, and so I have been thinking for a while what I should prepare as a surprise for her.
She likes to eat cake that uses fresh ingredients and tastes not too sweet. And also prefers after eating the cake, she will not have the kind of guilty feeling for getting a tummy back on track.
It is kind of a challenge for me to bake a cake with such a contrasting combination.
Maybe a moist chocolate cake with lesser sugar and creamy chocolate frosting will accomplish my mission?
Oh well, let's have a try and see how it goes.
I adopt a recipe which is suppose to make 1 layer of 8 inches round cake to bake a 2 layers of 6 inches round cakes. Since there are 5 of us sharing a cake in a restaurant after dinner, a smaller cake is a lot easier to transport around and to divide for eating.
Ingredients used including sifted cake flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, meringue powder, salt, unsalted butter, granulated sugar, eggs, vanilla extract, water and evaporated milk. This is a recipe I used many time for baking a moist chocolate cake and it hasn't failed me so far.
Everything has gone smooth up until I have poured the batter into the cake tins. The cake batter is not evenly divided and spread! I ended up with 2 uneven sizes of cakes.
After 2 straight hours of repeating icing done on the cake, the upper layer cake keeps sliding downwards. This is absolutely not what I expect to achieve after so much icing work has been done!
However, despite my hard struggle to 'rescue' the bad situation, it doesn't improve much. And so I used a toothpick inserted into the middle of the cake to stick both layers steadily.
Here's the end result: 2 layers of 6 inches chocolate cake where the surface is not level...
In spite of the ugly looking, the cake tastes good, as I initially hoped so.
And I am glad that my friend like it!
It is kind of a challenge for me to bake a cake with such a contrasting combination.
Maybe a moist chocolate cake with lesser sugar and creamy chocolate frosting will accomplish my mission?
Oh well, let's have a try and see how it goes.
I adopt a recipe which is suppose to make 1 layer of 8 inches round cake to bake a 2 layers of 6 inches round cakes. Since there are 5 of us sharing a cake in a restaurant after dinner, a smaller cake is a lot easier to transport around and to divide for eating.
Ingredients used including sifted cake flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, meringue powder, salt, unsalted butter, granulated sugar, eggs, vanilla extract, water and evaporated milk. This is a recipe I used many time for baking a moist chocolate cake and it hasn't failed me so far.
Everything has gone smooth up until I have poured the batter into the cake tins. The cake batter is not evenly divided and spread! I ended up with 2 uneven sizes of cakes.
After 2 straight hours of repeating icing done on the cake, the upper layer cake keeps sliding downwards. This is absolutely not what I expect to achieve after so much icing work has been done!
However, despite my hard struggle to 'rescue' the bad situation, it doesn't improve much. And so I used a toothpick inserted into the middle of the cake to stick both layers steadily.
Here's the end result: 2 layers of 6 inches chocolate cake where the surface is not level...
In spite of the ugly looking, the cake tastes good, as I initially hoped so.
And I am glad that my friend like it!
