Before I get to the how's of that, let's rewind a bit to the Thursday night before Friday's parties. Cake #1 was frosted and hanging out in the fridge, I was feeling pretty on top of things and more than ready to bake cake #2.
Chocolate had been explicitly requested for Dietrich's cake, but he strikes me as someone who loves the classics, so I knew it would be best to bring a basic chocolate cake with little adornment. In this case, simply lightly sweetened whipped cream with a quiet bourbon vanilla kick.
I chose the recipe for Sour Cream Chocolate Cake from Nigella Lawson's How to Be a Domestic Goddess book. Now, I love Nigella as much as most and I really love the way she speaks and writes about food. That said, I find her recipes very hit-and-miss. Or at least, I have hit and miss luck with them. And Thursday night's was no exception...
A good cake gone bad (though it tasted pretty good). I'm not yet sure what happened. It was the first time I made a cake using the flour into butter approach as opposed to the standard sugar into butter. Rose Levy Beranbaum uses f-b method in her Cake Bible, which I have been meaning to make something from. Now I really will as a way to practice with the method.
But what to do about Dietrich's cake? It was 11pm on Thursday. On Friday, there would only be a short time between getting home from work and leaving for Queens. This was not the time to experiment or be unprepared.
I have a kitchen with a few small counter tops, so baking "stations" set up with pre-measured ingredients make a lot of sense when I have no time to let myself get daydreamy and mistake-prone (which happens more than I'd care to admit). On Friday, I set up station 1, also know as The Beginning...
And station 2, aka, The End...
I used a Martha Stewart recipe for Devil's Food Cake, cutting the ingredients by half as I wanted a one layer 9" cake. It baked up beautifully, and I sat it by an open window to cool while I whipped up the Bourbon-Vanilla whipped cream (using wonderful vanilla my sister gave me from this place). Not wanting to risk damage, I frosted the cake at the party, and then set it out on the table next to the beautiful (and delicious) ice cream cake his wife Wynne made...
After the singing and blowing out of candles, pieces of each cake were passed around...
...and as the ice cream melted, it soaked into the chocolate cake, making one utterly glorious mixture. Each on their own was really good, but together—now that's what I call a birthday cake.
Done and done.
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