Party Cake

For Father’s Day we did a whole lot of things– including my sister giving my dad blueberry bushes, and my mother nobly agreeing to give up space in the garden for them to grow. One of the things I did was make a cake. It was supposed to be a big chocolate layer cake, but due to those sometimes not-so-fun compromises that have to be made when you live with other people, the oven was not available, the wrong type of cocoa was in the pantry, and things went downhill from there. So the cake ended up being the “classic butter” cake out of Flo Braker’s cookbook, and I made the sour cream chocolate frosting from Trish Boyle’s “The Cake Book”. Jill, who is a pastry chef, has that book on her blog’s recommended list, and I bought the book last summer but had yet to make anything out of it, due to the pie project– so I made the sour cream chocolate frosting just to get my toes wet with the book.

The cake turned out well, even though I’m not really a fan of plain/yellow cakes paired with chocolate icing. The icing was a little difficult to work, as you can probably see. Fortunately I remembered the hot knife method and used that to even things out a bit. It was still messy, but then I remembered seeing a cake in James McNair’s cake cookbook that was covered in coloured candy buttons. I ran upstairs, got out a box of Smarties (that’s Canadian Smarties, for you Americans) from my bedside table (it was waiting to be mailed in a package to my nieces and nephew in Texas), and decorated the cake. I think this is such a happy-looking way to decorate a cake that I wanted to share it with you. If you aren’t a professional pastry chef, like Jill, or an amazingly professional amateur, like my friend Cathy, this is an easy idea for cake decoration. And who says that reading cookbooks isn’t extremely valuable? I have just proven twice over that reading cookbooks is educational and lifesaving.

As I cut into the cake later I remembered all over again how much I love that moment when you first cut into a layer cake. The way it looks and feels as the knife goes in, I just love it. It’s your first hint if you’ve done the cake right, how it starts to slice.