according to Proverbs 16:18, the following post is pure bad juju. let's pretend like it's a tutorial and not just me bragging about being awesome.

...and we're back!

i know, you thought that yesterday was just a fluke and that i'd disappear back into the ether again.

nope!!

to start things off, i'd like to gloat about that cake that i made [frantically] yesterday morning.



that was the finished product. nothing spectacular, right? wrong. imma let me finish, but [apparently] this cake was the best thing i've made all year. and it's not like i haven't baked that much. let me share some of my other creations from 2013:


this was a cake for the 17th b-day of the young lady who helps out in the fileroom at the office. she's a lovely young lady and i like her, which is really saying a lot because i pretty much hate teenage girls. anyway it was a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, surrounded by a wall of pirouline cookies. with some pirouline cookies crumbled on top.



next up, we have the fanciest cake i've ever made. it was a made-from-scratch hummingbird cake with made-from-scratch cream cheese frosting. that frosting took ohhhhh idk like 2 hours to apply. but then the next day i woke up feeling sickly so i didn't take the cake to work like i had planned on, because i didn't want to poison anyone. AND THEN I WAS EXTREMELY ILL FOR LIKE OVER A WEEK so it's a damn good thing i didn't feed my biological warfare cake to anyone, especially the pregnant lady it was intended for!! so yeah that cake went in the trash. i don't want to talk about it.



i can't really express how irritated i am that the ribbon fell down on one side when i took this picture. but let's just say .. very irritated.



and finally, we have my valentine's cake. it was just a [homemade] vanilla cake with pink zebra stripes and [homemade] orange-cream cheese frosting, surrounded with amaretto cookies. people loved this thing. i dropped it off on my way into a meeting. when i came out of the meeting, there was like maybe a crumb or two left.

and YET! somehow this one-layer, made-in-a-super-hurry cake for which i did crazy substitutions and used ridiculous fudging techniques (no time to cream butter with sugar, i just melt the butter and see what happens) and it's the best thing ever. the person that i made it for said that once she got a forkful of the cake to her face and could smell it, she remembered her 11th birthday and her mommy. people.

she said that the smell of this cake brought tears to her eyes.

now that is a damn good cake! amirite?! ok ok, enough gloating. anyways, everyone wanted the recipe for this thing. so i'll post it here, as much as i can remember on account of i was just kicking this shit from my head.

The Best Cake I've Ever Made

Ingredients:

• 1c white sugar
• 1/2c butter (melted in the microwave. sort of. not all the way. like not totally liquid, but some liquid. it's um ... a science.)
• 2 eggs
• 2t pure vanilla extract
• 1t coconut extract
• 1 1/2c all-purpose flour
• 1 3/4t baking powder (not baking soda)
• 1/2c vanilla greek yogurt

Directions:

1. preheat oven to 350°.
2. grease and flour a 9" round cake tin.
3. whisk the mostly-melted butter with the sugar. it should be light and fluffy. [this is one of the things that makes the texture of the cake nice and light and fluffy, so don't fuck it up.]
4. add the eggs, vanilla and yogurt and mix well.
5. add the flour, about 1/2c at a time, mixing between additions. don't over-mix. if the batter seems too thick, you can thin it out with a little milk. but then again, this batter is supposed to be a little thicker than most cake batters, so don't add too much milk. just eyeball it.
6. pour batter into prepared pan.
7. bake until done. yeah so this is a little tricky. my cake ended up looking perfect on the outside about 25 minutes into the cooking time, but was still cake-soup on the inside. if that happens, gently cover the top of the cake with aluminium foil and keep baking until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean.
8. when the cake is done, remove it from the oven and let it hang out in the cake pan for 5-10 minutes. then run a butterknife around the inside of the pan and invert the cake onto a wire rack and let it cool the rest of the way.

Frosting

so, it turns out that i don't actually like frosting. but this frosting wasn't too bad. It's not all sickly sweet from powdered sugar, i guess.

Ingredients:

• 8oz cream cheese
• 2t vanilla and/or coconut extract (or to taste, i think i may have done 2 t vanilla and 1 t coconut, don't remember.)
• 2T granulated sugar
• 1T honey (spray some PAM onto your measuring spoon so the honey doesn't stick)

Directions:

1. mix that ish up. real good. try to avoid lumps.

*it would be best to do this with a hand mixer, but mine broke a long time ago and i tried to use my kitchen aid instead, but the whisk doesn't go all the way to the bottom of the bowl so ... i ended up with lumpy frosting. which necessitated the following:

Cake Topping:

Ingredients:

• almond flour
• cinnamon
• sugar - brown if you have it, white if not.
• honey

Directions:

1. combine ingredients. sprinkle artistically over your fugly frosting. drizzle with some more honey.

so anyway, that's the cake that everyone loved so very much because i did a great job because i'm a genius and an artist and nobody appreciates me!!