My mum and I were thinking hard for ideas for my sister's birthday cake and it took almost a whole week before we decided on one. We had a rough idea of what flavour and type of cake to make but we wanted it to be a little unique, something we've never done before. We settled on making a strawberry cheesecake with a peek-a-boo center after seeing it in on of my mum's cookbooks
My mum got down to making the cake on Saturday but I didn't have much of a mood to get stuck in till much later. I stayed away after learning from past experience that if I wasn't in the mood, the cake would probably get destroyed in my hands somehow!
Getting the strawberries to stay in the pattern was quite a painstaking chore and quite unnerving too as we thought the cheese filling would drag some of the berries out of position.
Thankfully it turned out well in the end! Should have grabbed more pictures though.
With the semester just 1 1/12 days away, I think this will probably be the last time I'll set foot anywhere near the oven for the next couple of months. With that in mind, I jumped on the final chance I had to make something. This was of course, done under the pretext of clearing away the leftover flour/sugar/whatnot so that my mum wouldn't start nagging about me singlehandedly causing a rise in the number of diabetics. Heh...
Anyway...I had some chocolate in the fridge from making my friend's cake so I decided to make a Zebra butter cake. The chocolate really made the cake a thousand times richer than normal but also a thousand times more delectable! Ah happy days.
I saw this can of strawberry pie filling when I was trawling the aisles in a supermarket some weeks back and I bought it without having any really concrete plans as to what to make with it. It had been some time since I made a pie so I thought perhaps another was probably due about now.
But I was bored with the usual 'cover the top with another slab of dough' or 'open top' type of pies and I've always wanted to try the lattice pattern that I've seen some use to add a touch of uniqueness to their pies.
Usually the dough would be pretty soft and go all crumbly when I try to pick it up and arrange the strips to create the pattern but this time around it held firm and I was able to arrange the strips without too much of a fuss(though it did break here and there).
But it was all good after taking it out of the oven so I was pretty satisfied. It's a real boost to the spirits when what pops out of the oven matches your mental picture pretty closely!
I heaved a huge sigh of relief when I handed the cake over to my friend...baking for others is pretty stressful! It's not that the difficulty has gone up; just that the stakes have skyrocketed.
If I bake something just for the fun of it like I normally do, then even if something goes horribly wrong, it either ends up in the trash or you can still eat it while consoling yourself. But if someone places an order for a birthday cake then you better hope to the high heavens that you have a good cake for them when they come round to collect it.
Can't just shrug my shoulders and say "Oh well...maybe next time I'll have a better one for you!".
Then there's the matter of taste. Your cake can either end up being the toast of the day or absolute drivel. The scary thing is that different people will have different expectations and tastebuds(?) so there's another problem.
My friend wanted as little cream as possible and more chocolate so I went for overkill by totally omitting any cream and overloading it with good ol' chocolate. Felt like I was making a Mud Cake instead of a chocolate cake really!
Thankfully I had my mum's help - I think she was more excited about my first order than I was! - especially with the decorations. It's great to have an extra pair of hands in the process guiding you like a lighthouse all the way from start to finish.
My friend either had extreme faith in me or was totally drunk when asking me to make the cake...I hope its the former rather than the latter...but I owe him so much for giving me the chance!
Woohoo!
Time for some soul soothing before hitting the sack.
