Post#100: My Cake Experience

This is my 100th published post here on BeingMervs, after slightly over a year. Didn't think I'd have the consistency to get this far when I first began. I surprise myself sometimes.

Okay… so this is how the story unfolded.

I skipped Friday evening’s usual gym session in order to make my way to the highly recommended baking supplies shop in Taman Megah. I was definitely not misinformed. You can get practically anything related to baking there. Seriously no joke!

Jo was running a bit late so we met up there. She was surprised to find that I did not have a shopping list. She got skeptical when she asked what we needed and I simply replied let’s just walk around and see. I had a rough idea on what I wanted to make and I kind of pulled recipes from all over the Internet. The problem was I could not make up my mind so I decided to just go with the usual cake ingredients – flour, butter, eggs, chocolate chips, icing sugar, etc.

It was a last minute decision to bake a test-cake in advance, just in case. So I got started that evening itself. Due to lack of supplies (I thought we had some stuff at home, apparently not), I ended up running out to the nearby supermarket for more supplies. As I was doing a quick run around, I noticed my favorite marshmallows sitting on the shelf and couldn’t help but pick up a pack to munch on back home. It wasn’t much later that it became an ingredient in Robert’s cake… another one of those spontaneous things.

Anyway, I finally made up my mind on the how the cake should be. The vision I had in my mind was something like this – chocolate chip butter cake; round 9-inch double-layered; chocolate butter cream filling with a layer of marshmallows in between; white butter cream frosting all over; hardened shiny chocolate glaze over the top with that dripping-down-the-sides effect; and of course the words “Happy Birthday Robert” on top.

The test-cake… something went wrong with the first process of the 2 layers of cake itself. Upon removal from the oven, I found that one layer had gotten very holey beneath the surface, like the cake developed air pockets while baking. And the sides were kind of hard… crusted but not burnt. Not exactly what I expected. Too bad it was too late to do anything.

The marshmallows went on easy enough, except for the slicing part… they’re so sticky on the inside. The chocolate butter cream filling wound up too watery, which was a good thing because it just flowed right down into the crevices of the bottom layer of the cake. Yet it was still thick enough to not make the cake soggy and drip out the sides. I have to admit that got me worried.

The butter cream frosting recipe I pulled off the net had an extremely high icing sugar content but I figured since it was just a test cake, I should just go with the recipe and see how it comes out. The texture was good… soft enough to spread all over the cake, and it hardened well in the refrigerator. I had neither the butter nor the tools to do any more icing & the chocolate glaze so I called it quits there… 1.30am the next morning.

The tasting when I woke up in the morning went alright. Dad and I each had a slice. The test cake was a little hard to cut through right out of the fridge. Dad found the icing too sweet, and the cake texture was a little harder than he would have liked, but still good. I agreed on both accounts. His suggestions were to use less icing sugar, and to mix the batter in one direction only for a longer period of time. My dad is a wise man.

After a quick run to the cake supplies shop in Taman Megah again, I began work on the real thing. The process was pretty much the same, but the baker was just a little bit wiser. I baked each layer of the cake individually and they both turned out perfectly identical. The sides weren’t crusty as before, and both layers didn’t have holes. I was thankful and could only pray that I didn’t fuck up the next few processes.

The chocolate butter cream filling was perfect this time. All I had to do was use a whole lot less milk. I sort of over killed with the milk the night before which led to the whole liquidy texture. It spread over the marshmallows and cake so well I couldn’t resist picking more marshmallows out of the bag and dipping them into the cream for a bite.

The top layer of the cake went right on perfectly and there was this interesting burger-like look… a bit large though. The icing process called for some changes. I greatly reduced the amount of icing sugar in the recipe, but also added the balance icing cream from the night before. End result was still sweet, but not as sweet as before. Jo had a fun time coating the cake in its snowy white frosting. The cake was starting to look presentable, thank goodness.

I left my vision of the complete cake with Jo and let her take over for the decoration portion. She played around with the chocolate glaze a little and decided to drip it across the entire top of the cake. It turned out beautifully. She added some cherries she picked out of a can of cocktail fruits as deco. And the final touches of the words in print were done. I liked the fact that it wasn’t the cursive-styled fonts they usually do at cake shops when writing “Happy Birthday So & So”. We went with the amateur look and printed “Happy B’day Robert” in pinkish icing. That really gave the cake a personal touch. With that done, the cake went back into the fridge for another round of cooling to harden the chocolate glaze and icing.

We were ready just in time for dinner, which was well deserved since I missed lunch being all tied up with the baking. Everyone agreed to delay the cake cutting to much later since we were overfed at dinner. With so much cream in the cake, I didn’t dare serve it after dinner anyway.

We wound up having the cake’s candles lit shortly past 11pm at Chee How’s place. Chee How’s mom was quite impressed just looking at the cake, saying we were very talented. I can’t imagine why. She insisted the same after trying a slice. I still cannot imagine why. She also complimented the fact that I didn’t use eggs for the frosting & icing because that would have made it hard to preserve the cake for more than 2 to 3 days. To be honest, I didn’t even know that people use eggs for icing cream. I just went with the first frosting recipe I came across.

After all said and done, it turned out good enough for people to split and tapau the unfinished portion. They mostly claimed they liked the cake but it’s really hard to accept a compliment as the truth when it comes from friends.

I’m just pleased no one called up to say they’re down with diarrhea or food poisoning. *phew*

The overall cost – 12 hours of work for 2 cakes, about RM140 spent, lots of leftover ingredients. I’ll probably try my hand at it again pretty soon.