Chocolate layer cake

 

One of my brother’s friends is having a birthday party tonight. Every guest is supposed to make  something sweet; of course my brother took the easy route by asking me to bake something. He said I could make whatever I wanted. It can get a bit overwhelming, when you get complete free range like that, can’t it? There are so many things I want to bake, and sometimes it’s hard to decide. Especially when you’re not the one who will be doing the eating. What if my brother’s friends – and the birthday boy! – don’t like what I chose? In the end I decided to go with chocolate. Because, honestly, who doesn’t like chocolate? I’m very pleased with the end result and, to be honest, slightly bitter that I have to give this whole cake away without being able to have a taste!

I took this Devil’s Food cake recipe from this post; I decided to go with a vanilla butter cream instead of the meringue frosting they used. I got some inspiration for the decoration from this lovely post but ended up using (store bought) meringue to top off the cake instead of piping even more butter cream on top of the ganache. I was afraid it’d be a bit of a butter cream overkill!

Penguin fun

My parents took a couple of ice cream classes a while back and ever since they’ve been bitten by the frozen-treats bug. They got one of those professional ice cream machine and everything. Yeah. It’s really no surprise that I’m so obsessed with baking and cooking, with parents like this. A friend recently asked my parents to make him a couple of ice cream cakes. My dad is the one who does the actual ice making, while my mom is always in charge of the cake assembly – she rocks at that kind of stuff.

Her plan was to make three different flavored cakes – one of them was for the kids, and she wanted to put fondant penguins on that one. Aha, I thought, the perfect job for me. The thing with having a talented and creative mom, though, is that everyone always assumes the really good stuff was made by her. “Have you seen those penguins mom made?” My brother asked me, “They are amazing!” (You should probably know that my brother is a bit of a penguin fan.) “No,” I told him, “I made them!” And he gave me this suspicious look like I would try to steal my mom’s thunder. Thanks a lot, bro.

Baby shower

Because I tend to bake something at least once a week (and on a bad week – or a good week, depends on how you look at it! – I might bake three or even four different things) there have to be people to actually eat the things I make. My parents’ sweet tooth isn’t that developed and my brother is just one man (one man with a big appetite, but still only one man). That’s why a lot of it gets shipped off to my neighbors. They seem to like what I make (either that or they’re too nice to tell me otherwise) and when their daughter gave birth to their second grandchild they asked me if I could bake some stuff for the baby shower/christening. “Sure!” I said, trying not to seem too excited. Play it cool, Aline.

I asked them what they’d like and they pretty much gave me free reign. My neighbor said the baby’s daddy really liked the Walnut and Coffee gateau I made, and that it’d be nice if I made the Rhubarb Buckle again.  So that’s what I did. I also made mini!merveilleux, cupcakes, brownies and shortbread cookies. It took me a couple of days to bake and decorate everything, but at the end of the road I was super proud of everything – and this ended up being my first paid job. The praise I got afterwards was amazing, my neighbor kept telling me how good everything was – and her daughter came by as well with the cutest Thank You card. An awesome experience all around.