Well, now's the moment of truth, the first official Procrasti-baker post. Complete with recipes, pictures, and a whole lot of boring drabble that I'm sure most people skip over.
So, without further ado, let us begin this rollercoaster of deliciousness.
Today is my Mother's birthday, so I decided that I would make her a very special cake.
A rainbow cake.
Can't get much more special than that.
This is really just a plain buttercake recipe I've adapted from one of my Mum's old cookbooks, it's simple, but as you'll see later, probably not the best choice for a layer cake.
Anyways, first off, I gathered my ingredients:
1 cup of butter (at room temperature)
1 cup of caster sugar
4 eggs
4 cups flour
1 cup milk
1 tbsp vanilla essence
assorted food colourings
(I didn't photograph those, because in reality I wasn't organised and more pulled things out of cupboards when I needed them rather than having them all at the beginning. They're really only listed here because it's more convenient to have them in a list. So here's the ingredients, in a list.)
Then I gathered my equipment. I'd heard from a friend of mine that disposable metal baking pans are excellent for making layer cakes, so I thought I'd give it a go. At the very least, they're cheap, and easy to procure.
I greased them really thoroughly, and added baking paper because I wasn't sure how much they'd stick.
Also, they had a pattern in the bottom, and I wanted my cakes flat.
To make the cake, I simply creamed together the butter and caster sugar*, added the eggs, one by one, then the vanilla essence. After that, I alternated adding flour and milk till everything was in the mixer, and kept beating till it was well combined.
*I cream the butter and sugar together till the mixture is pale and has a creamy consistency (shock), some people dissolve all the sugar, I'm too lazy/impatient.
Then it was a relatively simple task of dividing the mixture into seven bowls.
I don't think anyone really appreciated the amount of cleaning up I had to do afterwards.
And adding the food colouring to make the colours of the rainbow (I won't list them, go back to primary school). I used liquid food colouring, because that was all I had. Sometime in the near future I may invest in paste or gel colours, because these weren't vibrant enough for my tastes, but they turned out okay.
Yeah, my violet kinda looks like someone beat a smurf to death with a baseball bat.
I only had four pans, so I baked them in lots of four. Which is convenient, because more than that probably wouldn't have fit in the oven anyway.
I don't think of them as 'thick', I call them 'space-occupyingly challenged'.
I had them in the oven for about 15-20 minutes, till they started getting a little brown, and a toothpick came out clean, you know the drill.
Next time I make this cake, I will find a runnier cake recipe, because this one is very thick, and doesn't spread well, so they didn't turn out quite as round and perfect as I would've liked. I will keep you posted, and possibly re-do this cake with a better recipe.
My younger brother came home, "What's with the play-dough?"
Little bugger.
After I'd cooled them, and chilled them in the freezer for a bit (about 10 minutes, till they were cold to touch), I cut some of the tops to make them flatter, then assembled them with layers of buttercream between colours and around the outside.
What do you do with uneven edges? Plug them with more icing, that's what!
My buttercream recipe is essentially 125g of butter with around 2 cups of pure icing sugar (give or take, depending on how thick you want your icing), thrown in a mixer and beaten till it doesn't get any paler. I made about 2.5 batches and still didn't have enough to cover it. Basically, it takes a lot of icing.
So, after about 3 hours of hard work, the cake looked pretty darn awesome, tasted okay (again, I need to find a better recipe), and Mum had a great birthday.
There are also plenty of leftovers, so I'm gonna look pretty darn awesome at Uni tomorrow.
Seriously, I have all of this to get rid of.
Until next time,
Procrasti-baker out.
