Wednesday, March 24, 2010

happy birthday daddy!

Today is my dad's birthday. So I made him a cake. This time the frosting turned out much better than my last sad attempt at a birthday cake.




Vanilla cake, vanilla frosting. I used whipped cream flavored with a bit of green tea powder in the layers, but I still didn't have enough frosting to really cover the outside of the cake.

And that frosting worked better than my attempt in February, but it's so ridiculously sweet it's like a diabetes attack. I used this recipe from Gale Gand at the Food Network. I'm still searching for a good frosting recipe that's smooth and creamy without being uber-sweet. I think I might go for a cream cheese frosting, but replace the cream cheese with marscapone. I would do whipped cream, only whipped cream doesn't stay set long enough for my liking. I don't really want to use gelatin (and I've tried in the past- I must be doing something wrong because it never seemed to work quite right).

The cake was good, and has a very tight crumb, but I kind of prefer a more spongy cake, personally. I used this recipe from an old Daring Baker's challenge, but I replaced the lemon zest/lemon extract with vanilla and it was just fine.

Things to work on include my piping skills and my lettering skills. But my cakes are getting better! I even had enough energy to glaze the fruit on top so it didn't dry out. :)