Baking: Birthday Cake

A few weeks ago, I decided to make a birthday cake for myself as a personal indulgence. (I'm 24!) I love to bake, and I figured that a birthday was a good excuse - once the school year is over, it's hard to justify baking a full recipe of anything without an affiliated group of people to then eat it. I decided on chocolate cake with a raspberry frosting - I always loved putting berry frosting on the cupcakes I brought to class in for birthdays when I was a kid.

I. Cake: I decided to use a recipe from Rose Levy Beranbaum's Cake Bible - All American Chocolate Butter Cake.

I'm really proud of how legit this parchment paper/butter/flour job looks on this pan. It's difficult to distribute the flour with any sort of finesse.

Cocoa, water, eggs and vanilla. The nice thing about Beranbaum is that she takes the time to explain why certain ingredients work for some cakes and not others. Why you use whole eggs for some cakes and just the yolks or whites for others, why water works better for chocolate cakes than milk. "Educational baking" sounds lame when I say that just now, but I guess I'm just the kind of nerd who digs that sort of thing.

Mmmm...butter.

The awesome thing about this batter was that there was a sort of intermediary step where it was flour, sugar, butter and chocolate without any eggs - that is, a delicious batter snack with minimal rationalization regarding salmonella and whatnot.

One layer after it came out of the oven. The cake ended up a little dry (I blame my terrible oven), but the chocolate flavor was really rich.

II. Raspberry Puree: An under-chronicled step, as it ended up taking most of the day and nearly all of my sanity. The process involves thawing and straining frozen raspberries to remove the liquid, and then the seeds. The hypothetically easy thawing step turned into a kitchen disaster when my spatula's handle snapped in half as I attempted to squeeze as much liquid as possible out of the berries. (You may or may not be able to see said broken spatula in the photo below.) The force of the tool breaking rocked the bowl the syrup was collecting in, sending it splattering on seemingly every surface in my kitchen. As if that wasn't enough, the seed-straining process was also a giant pain in the ass - Beranbaum recommends using a fine-setting food mill or a special Cuisanart attachment, but all I had was a fine-mesh strainer. I couldn't exert enough force with a spatula on its own, so I ended up largely using my hands to continuously push as much seedless pulp as possible through the strainer.

The measuring cup I used to reduce the juice in the microwave. Literally, a hot mess.

The aftermath. It was a trying evening. It's a good thing this stuff freezes for a year, because such a process should not be attempted with any frequency unless you have the patience of a saint.

III. Buttercream Frosting: I like to use the frosting recipe from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. It's essentially just butter, confectioner's sugar, and cream and I don't yet have the confidence to attempt recipes that use hot corn syrup or eggs. (The whole "mix without getting the syrup on the beaters" thing really psychs me out. Maybe once I've got a stand mixer.)

Frosting with the raspberry puree added. It turned out nicely smooth and flavorful.

I tried some different photos to attempt to really capture how bright the pink is in the frosting, but I think this is the best I could do. All in all, a much better frosting job than I've done previously. I think the frosting job benefitted from the cake sitting in the fridge for a day or two after I baked it. Originally I planned to try and do something tricked-out with fresh raspberries and whipped cream accents, but the raspberry puree process was so exhausting that I just decided to leave it as is.

A slice of cake, enjoyed with a scoop of ice cream. This slice ended up being totally enormous, but really good.