Baked Goods

I didn’t get a birthday cake this year. At least not yet. The weekend of my birthday we were living it up at an indoor water park in Ohio. The following week we were catching up after living in up at an indoor water park in Ohio. The following weekend I went to my grandma’s funeral in Utah.

As of this morning it had been two weeks since my birthday without having partook of some chocolaty, buttery frosting sitting atop a light and fluffy yellow layer cake. To make matters worse, Heather installed a cable in the minivan that allows us to hook up our iPhones to the audio/video system. Now Addison and Luc enjoy their favorite Cook’s Illustrated podcast on making fluffy yellow layer cake everywhere we go (I see it as educational television).

Clearly something had to be done  so Luc and I got to work. For those of you familiar with Luc’s ability to recite the Cook’s Illustrated apple galette podcast it will come as no surprise to you that he can do the same for light and fluffy yellow cake podcast. As I was going through the various stages of cake creation Luc would be sitting next to me repeating the narrator’s lines from the podcast. Hilarious.

Here is Luc, proudly sitting next to his creation. He may or may not have dipped into the frosting once or twice. Here is another one of him as we prepare to frost.

While making this particular cake I realized a couple of things.

1) Our oven is about 12 degrees shy of level.

I mean these cakes look like ski jumps. How can I work under these conditions? I think this may be reason enough to throw out the whole unit and get a gas range and two ovens. I just have to convince Heather that the situation is irreparable and our very culinary existence is at stake.

2) I love thermometers. Actually I already knew this but now I have photographic proof. Knowing the temperature of your food is the pathway to happiness. Here are two action shots from today. The first picture shows our chocolate while we wait for it to get below 100 degrees. The second is where we verified that the butter was ~65 degrees. The frosting turned out rich and creamy. We owe it all to the thermometer.

In case any of you are wondering, you should not a use kitchen thermometer on children. The probe is sharp, not smooth like children’s thermometers. No good can come from sticking a sharp ended tool into an orifice.

3) Bread knife bad, some knife I used to cut cake tonight good. In the past I’ve used the bread knife to slice cake. Perhaps this is why I have angst whenever it’s time to cut and serve. The cake always looks like it was a victim in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre after I’m done.

But today I pulled out some knife that came with our knife set, but which we had never before employed. It is skinny with a smooth edge and appealing curves. Just look at the nice clean cuts I made with it. Perhaps it is a cake knife. Maybe it is a knife for slapping butter around. Heather thinks it is a ham knife. I don’t know, but I like it.

My favorite part of tonight’s cake was that the cake isn’t even my birthday cake since we didn’t have people over to celebrate. That means we get to do the whole thing over again in a few days.

Before we part, let me show you the last picture taken of one of the cake slices while it was still alive. Shortly after this picture was taken the slice was devoured by ravenous beasts.