happy birthday mommy!

My mother's birthday was last Thursday, so I baked her a cake. I think this made up for the fact that both my siblings and I miscalculated her birthday and had convinced each other that her birthday was Friday. (This is the peril of keeping track of your mother's birthday via the lunar calendar- but we've never gotten it wrong before, I'm not entirely sure what happened this year.)

Anyway. It's just a vanilla cake with blueberries and vanilla buttercream. And kiwi and blackberries on top (the strawberries at the grocery store were not fresh at all). It tasted good, but the buttercream sucked. I'm giving up on real buttercream until I get a stand mixer that can handle it and incorporate the butter quickly enough. My hand mixer just doesn't have the horsepower.

See what I mean about the buttercream? It's not supposed to be grainy like this, but it's because the butter wasn't soft enough when I added it and it didn't melt into the meringue quickly enough. Bah. For my dad's birthday I'm going to go with a whipped cream frosting, it's just easier.