Birthday!

Happy Birthday to Me!  Spent the entire day making this cake yesterday.  Woke up at 9+ in the morning and baked the cake.  Rested till afternoon before I made the icing.

I planned on using Martha Stewart's 7-minute frosting, but it was way too liquid to make the design I wanted (i.e. rose).  So, I trudged on, making 1/10th of a batch of "buttercream" from i am baker's blog.  (I hear that it is too sweet (from the adults), but the texture is good and Min loves it cos it's sweet.)

The dumb thing is, I don't know why I felt that the full batch is too much because I ended up having to make the frosting 5 times just to ice the entire cake.  Then again, humans learn from mistakes, so lesson learnt!

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So, about this cake....

It's a chocolate velvet cake (the one I made for Min's birthday which everyone liked and happens to be dairy-free, with rosewater frosting.  Tastes like bandung. ;)  I think I put way too much rosewater though - we couldn't really taste the cake.  Amidst all these though, eldest sis noticed that the cake tasted slightly different from the one I made for Min's birthday.  Very sharp! I ran out of Hershey's cocoa powder and replaced maybe about 1/3 of the cocoa powder with Morinaga cocoa (which I personally think seems to taste like dutch-processed cocoa).

I was quite happy last night.  Cos my two sisters both asked for second helpings.  This isn't normal for a cake I've made.

And did I mention how everyone was impressed by the look of the cake?  It wasn't that hard to make, but I have to say that there's a lot to be improved in terms of the frosting.  The frosting wasn't exactly smooth (maybe needed to beat it a bit more before adding the sugar (recipe said 2-4 minutes, I beat it like for half a minute only cos I was getting tired from making the frosting so many times).  It was also difficult to "break" the frosting from the piping bag when I'm done with one rose.  Perhaps the frosting should be thinned out a little more.  I was wary of over-thinning it, in case the shape couldn't hold.

All in all, I'm glad, because this is all that's left of the cake after 5 adults and 1 child (who only eats the cream) had their share of the cake. :)