Beginning the year on a smelly note

I didn't mean to.  I had assumed that these days, the great spirit of the kitchen resides in my hands and the wonderful and benevolent oven will not do anything underhanded. They didn't. In fact they performed beautifully. It was the icing that decided to act up.

This is what happened:

My son Saboor's birthday falls on 2nd January and this time (also) I decided to bake a cake for him. Funny how I didn't bother to post any blog about what happened last year. But that was so hilarious, I will have to dedicate an entire post to that.

This time I decided to bake a different cake for him. I didn't want the usual chocolate cake topped with chocolate icing and filled with chocolate filling. I must be growing old. I mean, who in their right minds would decide not to make a chocolate cake.

I looked up the recipe from this book called Mc Calls Best Cakes and Pies, and chose to make Mc Calls Best White Cake. Following the instructions was easy and using just one round pan, I made three layers of the cake. I couldn't resist adding cocoa to one of the layers. Then, I wrapped them up in parchment paper, tossed it in the freezer for sometime and wondered what kind of icing I should do.

I was always happy with a ganache type of icing because it is the easiest and always delivered good results. But recently, I was also doing a pretty good job of whipped cream icing. Still, I wanted to try something new and I decided to opt for the White Mountain icing from the same book.

We decided to celebrate Saboor's birthday at my moms place this time so we took the cakes and went there. I started preparing the icing for which we needed to make a thick sugar syrup. Then, this had to be added in a thin stream to whipped egg whites. What you get is a fluffy and sweet icing that is spreadable but hardens really fast.

I sandwiched the three cakes with the icing, and covered the top also. It was already starting to harden and I was having a difficult time but I managed somehow. The end result was this:

[caption id="attachment_10" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="S for Saboor"][/caption]

Which is not bad at all. I mean, it looked pretty decent enough. There was still some icing left which had become hard, so I tried to fashion a mouse out of it, then a cat and I think it ended up looking like an owl. Take a look:



Ok so it won't win any prizes but I was still quite pleased about it. After all, I had done everything myself! No shortcuts at all.

Then the time came to cut the cake. Half of it soon disappeared as soon as it was cut. The general consensus was that the cake was not moist enough. It was a little dry. I agreed although I felt defensive about it.

[caption id="attachment_12" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Birthday cake"][/caption]

You might be wondering what is wrong here. I mean, so far everything seemed to have worked out pretty well. Yes, like I said the icing acted up. You did note that I made it with egg whites. I knew those had a propensity for smelling a little but while we ate the cake, there was nothing wrong. No eggy smell. As yet.

A little while later when I was looking around for something to store the cake, I realised that the inevitable will happen. You put raw egg in something, it's bound to throw up a stink.

So, the cake failed my 'disappearance' test. If a cake didn't disappear soon enough from the table, it wasn't good. Not good enough.