Last weekend was +Annette's birthday, and she requested a cake! I haven't made anything but banana cake since high school, but with recipes to follow how hard could it be?
I started out with an attempt to make a low-chemical gluten free sponge cake, sandwiched together with pear jam and covered in marshmallow icing. This was possibly a little ambitious, but following the instructions I had high hopes of creating something spectacular!
The cake batter was mostly eggs and sugar, with a little corn flour and arrowroot, so it was pretty fluid. The recipe requested three circular cake tins at 23cm diameter or two square tins, but we only had a series of nesting circular tins with the largest at the requested size. I figured a tiered cake wouldn't be too bad. From the look of the mixture, it was going to make pretty shallow layers and then stack them together to create the full cake.
The circular tins has removable bottoms to assist with popping the cake out; a latch on the side tightens or loosens the sides to clamp the base in place. I was a little worried that the batter might leak out the bottom, but it didn't start doing that until it had been in the oven for a couple of minutes.
I suspect the heat may have expanded the sides enough to break the seal a little. With regular thick cake mixture that wouldn't be a problem, but with this liquid stuff it was. I poured the mixture out of the circular tins into a couple of rectangular loaf tins; the tops had started turning foamy while it was still runny underneath, so I tried to mix it together to make sure it wouldn't go lumpy. After cleaning all the semi-cooked goop out of the oven, I put the new tins in and started again.
It failed spectacularly. I ended up with two really flat cakes with almost-burned sides, cake-like tops with large uneven ripples, and a gummy and warped underside. It didn't even taste good. Into the bin, and on to Cake Number Two with time slipping away before company arrived!
The second cake was a plain butter cake with vanilla butter icing. The mixture was thick and smooth, but I took no chances and cooked it in a solid-based rectangular tin. It took a nail-biting hour in the oven, but cooked all the way through and slid out of the tin without disintegrating or sticking to the tin!
It did start to pull apart when I tried to flip it over, since I wasn't aware of the cake-flipping technique - place another cooling rack on top and then pick up both racks and flip to keep the cake intact. Also it helps to wait for the cake to cool off a bit, but I was running out of time to get it finished. On a taste test, even with rice milk and Nuttelex substitutions, it tasted delicious! Spirits buoyed, I moved on to the icing.
The icing was pretty much just icing sugar (or icing mixture in our case) and butter (Nuttelex) with a little vanilla essence. It's soft and creamy, not that shell-like icing. I started applying it to the cake, only to find it melting and threatening to slide off! Luckily I'd only applied one smear with a knife, so I scraped it off and put the cake in the fridge to speed up the cooling process.
Just before our guests arrived, I started icing again. It went on pretty thick, and it wasn't pretty, but it worked. I must admit, I could definitely taste the Nuttelex in the icing, so I don't think it was the greatest, but all up the birthday cake turned out very tasty and was well received.
It took a huge effort, and a near-meltdown in the middle, but perseverance and Annette's calming influence got me there in the end.
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