Cakewalk?
When I have a spare minute in the day, I'm an avid reader of food blogs, but I always fascinate at how some of their writers seem to whip up a cake within the span of an hour or two during the day! For me, I have found, putting together a really great cake is an all day affair, and two weeks ago, I took a much-needed few days off - one of which I used to set about making my mother a birthday cake.
Selecting the cake is Step 1. Seven open cookbooks later, I had resorted to the Web... pasting together scraps of other recipes to satisfy my craving for an exotic yet crowd-pleasing cake for nine people, with an undercurrent of chocolate. I found the chocolate coconut cake recipe on a blog called Chocolate & Zucchini, but knew I also wanted the frosting. So I found a chocolate coconut frosting recipe online as well and headed off to Step 2: grocery shopping.
I love grocery shopping, but find myself very easily distracted, thinking of all the other things I might like to make that week, and sometimes losing track of the mission at hand. I also suddenly realized the more exotic the cake, the harder the ingredients are to find! Three stores later I was on my way to Step 3: Making the cake.
Why is it that you always get the most phone calls when you have your hands wrist deep in a bowl of blended butter and flour? The next three hours went into mixing all the ingredients, juggling the warm-up, cool-down, warm-up-again careful steps of baking, and finally throwing the whole mess inot the oven with my fingers crossed.
Inspired by a recent episode of "Baking with Julia" where guest-chef Martha Stewart showed Julia Child how to make a "simple wedding cake" for 900 or something... I decided to really put my back into the decorating part of the process. For me, that's the fun part; and while chocolate chips, coconut flakes, and almonds are no delicate marzipan cherries with toothpick sized stems, I think it came out pretty darn good!
