This, my friends, is the cake that nearly did me in at the ripe age of twenty two one afternoon a couple of weeks ago.
It all really started earlier that afternoon. I was having lunch with a friend when a call from my mum came through asking if i could bake a small birthday cake- “anything chocolatey”- for a friend of hers. Despite the fact that i had a loaf of bread doing its first rise in the fridge and a tray of brownies to bake for J’s brother, i found myself agreeing to do so anyway.
I chose to go with Rose Levy Bebambrum’s chocolate fudge cake with chocolate silk meringue buttercream. The batter itself was pretty quick and easy to make. I got a 7″ cake and twelve cupcakes out of it. While the cupcakes came out perfect, i had no such luck with the cake. To my horror, after a good twenty minutes of the oven, the top of the cake started to crack and out spewed uncooked batter, not unlike an erupting volcano. I suspect the cake might have benefited from baking at a slightly lower temperature for a longer time, given that it was much taller than it was wide. Lesson #1- start baking your cake at a slightly lower temperature- it’s easier to turn up the heat than to try salvage a cake that’s baked in too hot an oven.
Once the cake was finally baked, i went about making the frosting. It wasn’t anything too complicated although it was fairly time consuming having to make two components- the creme anglaise and then the italian meringue. That went pretty well and soon it was time to level the top of the cake, split it into two layers and frost it. And that, my friends, is when the real trouble started.
I’ve always been chickenshit about sandwiching fragile cake layers between frosting and this time, it seems i had every reason to be- just as i had gingerly placed the second layer on the partially frosted cake, it split into three pieces with each piece slowly sliding off the frosting and onto the cake board. By time i got over the complete horror of what was unfolding before my very eyes, there was frosting spilling out from between the two cake layers in every possible direction. Lesson #2- have your brother or someone who has no invested interest in the cake do the dirty job. Worst come to worst, if anything happens, you have someone to blame.
So i did what any sane person would do- i contemplated giving my mum’s friend the cupcakes instead, piling that pathetic resemblance of a cake into a huge bowl and wallow in self-pity by polishing it off in a spoon. Then i realized that would translate to me having to run on the treadmill every day for the next two months to work it off and suddenly sucking it up seemed like the better and much wiser option. So i stuck wooden skewers into the cake to secure the two layers together, continued slathering on the frosting and covered the very messy job with crumbled bits of cake i had from leveling the layers out a la Dorie Greenspan style. Lesson #3- refrain from polishing off all cake crumbs even if it’s the best damned cake you’ve ever had- it can come in very handy at covering up sloppy frosting.
Thankfully, the cake held together in the fridge and made it to the birthday recipient in one piece.
On a more serious note though, from the cake crumbs and swipes of frosting i had, the cake was pretty good- it was huge on chocolate but light in texture. But it’s the frosting that really had me swooning. Smooth, silky and so damned light, i can’t imagine it not being perfect for any cake ever.
I guess i know what i’ll generously slathering on all my cakes from now on. Goodbye plain old buttercream, hellooo silk meringue frosting!
