Confessions of a Bake-a-holic!

The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate ? Oprah Winfrey.

In childhood we longed to grow up but now we want to be kids.Looking back at good old days, birthday’s wasn’t jes about the gifts…. it was more about celebrating it with my loved ones and yes how can I forget the yummilicious food that Mom made all the time.She used to give me a box full of chocolates to be distributed at school and neighbourhood.No uniform day-that used to be the best thing.Oh, I just wonder where those wonder years melted away?

Regardless of however it is now,Birthdays are special. And it was a special time for me too,as it was P’s birthday.I baked the cake as per his liking.He prefers plain simple cakes to anything chocolaty.So I ended up with a Vanilla Cake with Pineapple Cream filling and whipped cream frosting.I haven’t seen him like any frosting other than Whipped cream, so it was cream all over the cake.Since it had to be a special cake I made a 10 inched three layered heart shaped cake and decorated it with Basket weave technique which I learnt while doing my Wilton course.This is one of my fav techniques and works best with buttercream frosting.I knew it was gona be challenging working with whipped cream coz of the texture,however it came out surprisingly well and was appreciated by everyone.I tripled the quantity of the mentioned recipe.

Recipe Source - Serena Bass’s Book (only for the cake)

Prep Time - 25mins

Baking time - 40min

Ingredients:

A cup Sugar

Two tsp Pure Vanilla Extract

Three Large eggs

a Cup Heavy cream

1 1/2 cup Cake Flour

1 1/2tsp Baking Powder

1/2 tsp Salt

1/4 C Granulated Sugar for dusting at the top(I skipped this one as my cake was well frosted)

Method: Preheat Oven at 350F.Grease a 10 inch cake pan.Beat Vanilla Extract,Egg and Sugar until its pale and thick.Separately beat cream in a bowl until soft peaks form.Turn this onto the egg mixture.Sift Flour,Baking Powder and salt,fold these together in the batter.Scrape the batter to the prepared pan ,sprinkle sugar on top and bake for 40mins or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.Once done,cool the cake on rack.

For the filling & frosting:

Ingredients:

Whipped cream - 1 1/2 pint

Crushed Pineapple - 4oz

Vanilla Extract - a drop

Powdered Sugar - 5tbsp

Method: Beat the cream along with the extract until soft peaks form.Just take 1 cup of this mixture and mix in the crushed pineapple,this would be used as filling .To the remaining cream add in the sugar and beat again till you end up with peaks(when u run it thru a spatula the peaks shud stand,thats the ideal consistency).

Assemble the cake: Cut the cake into two halves(using a cake leveler is the best way to do it,if not you can also use a serrated knife).Spread the filling generously on top of one of the halves.Place the second half on top of it and frost the cake using the cream.If you are good at decorating the cake,you may use your pastry bags and nozzles to do the same.Adding food colors to the cream is also an option.

A closer look at the Basket weave technique

Verdict: It was a well crafted cake,which tasted as good as it looked. Perhaps my best attempt in frosting so far. Instead of using any techniques jes a simple layer of frosting wud be great too.

This is off too Mahimaa’s Contribute your Cakes and Cookies event.