No birthday left behind
April 14th, 2009
Growing up, my mom rarely had cakes or candies in the house. Soda? Forget about it. Sometimes all I wanted was a bag of potato chips to feel like a normal kid. But I’m glad she never went for that. In the short term, I think I ate a lot of crap at my friends’ houses. But in the long term, it set me up to understand a kitchen without pop culture. It taught me respect for the ‘from scratch’ recipes we made. And most of all, it REALLY made me appreciate whenever we did have sweets in the house!
Birthdays were always that time. When my birthday came around, my mom would make whatever dinner I wanted (usually eggplant parm) and bake whatever cake I asked for. She had a book of cake shapes and was able to turn a sheet cake into a bunny head or something like that. I loved that book. As I got older, my sheet cake request turned into a cheesecake request. And even now, I take birthday cakes quite seriously!
But the problem in my cake repertoire is that they are just full of sugar. Of course, “homemade icing full of sugar” is still way better than “jar of store bought icing full of sugar”.
For my friend Sharon’s birthday I decided to put some new cake baking techniques to the test and surprise her during our weekly Lost night. Her cake would be sweetened only with natural sweeteners, use only whole grain flour, and include some kind of nutrient-giving vegetable. See, Sharon likes this sort of thing, so it was perfect.
For starters, I used Heidi’s recipe for basic chocolate cake and Chocolate Whipped Cream Frosting.
The recipe made enough for 3 layers, which was good because I was dying to make use of Ricki’s Spiked Sweet Potato Truffle filling.
When all was said and done, I frosted and added some dried coconut on top to play off the coconut oil and milk in the recipe. It really came together nicely. Baking can be so satisfying – especially knowing that all the ingredients were really quality.
We brought out the cake at the first commercial break during Lost while everyone was gathered and not TOO into the Ben plot yet. It was fantastic! (The cake, not the show. Ok, the show too.) The chocolate layers were maybe a bit dry, i should have cooked them less. But the flavors went together fabulously! I’m not sure if kids would like the filling, it had an orange/sweet potato flavor that we loved but it definitely was different.
Like cooking with new and different ingredients? Join me for an upcoming cooking class!
