In commemoration of the most important holiday in this house, I achieved a personal first: making a cake. No Free Lunch is also a celebrating its first display of my amazing art skills. Last year, I told Ariel I would make a cake for her birthday. Looking back at my old posts, it becomes obvious dessert is not my strong point. Baking, especially cakes, intimidates me, as it is difficult to experiment and fix mistakes. Sadly, last year's cake never materialized, largely for these reasons. This time, I resolved to bake a cake, and with Ariel's expert help, produced this masterpiece.
The recipes I used for the cake and frosting are both from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. Ariel said today that I treat this book as "a bible." I guess that makes me a fundamentalist Bittmanist. There are worse things to be called. The cake is Bittman's Golden Layer Cake, but made as a sheet cake in a 9x13. Because of this, the cake ended up a little thin, so next time I would make extra batter. The frosting is his chocolate buttercream. Both components were excellent. When tasked to decorate the cake, I turned to my artistic specialty: square-rigged ships. I am particularly proud of the American flag on the stern and the mermaid in the water. The cake is delicious, and definitely superior to the average "box cake." I also got a lot of experience using the rather intimidating stand mixer.
We also spent the day making dim sum. On the menu today were potstickers, char siu bao (steamed pork buns), and nai huang bao (custard buns). As I perfect both kinds of buns, you can definitely expect them to show up on the blog eventually. Today's results were the best we've made so far, thanks to receiving the Yank Sing dim sum book from grandpa.
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