Disaster Averted

Have I mentioned that when it comes to cakes I'm kind of a psycho? I've never taken a class. I'm certainly no professional baker. But I really like cakes and I like them to taste fantastic and look great. All in all, I'd call it a weakness of mine. Daddy suggested that I had enough going on and that I really didn't need to make a cake for his birthday. A store-bought cake would suffice. I even did that last year, but I just couldn't do it again...and with that Space Mountain Cake coming up next week, I need to start getting my cake-making skills honed again.

So, I scoured Epicurious for a recipe that sounded yummy, but didn't require a ridiculous number of ingredients I didn't have. I came up with a Lemon Lattice White Chocolate Cake. It's white chocolate cake with white chocolate/whipped cream frosting and a lemon curd filling. Based on another recipe I'd seen, I decided to add fresh raspberries to the filling too. It was a great idea, but I think I tried too hard to do things in phases. Certain bits didn't hold up all that well over time.

I baked the cake on Thursday, made lemon curd and started the frosting on Friday. Frosted the cake on Friday...discovering 1) I didn't have enough raspberries and 2) the recipe didn't make enough frosting for my towering cake. I used some raspberries from the freezer and put together some more frosting, which had to sit overnight before I could use it. I tried to pipe a lemon curd lattice on the top, but the lemon peel kept getting stuck in the frosting tip. In the end, I decided a nice layer of lemon on the top would look better.

But after a night in the fridge, I learned some things about this particular cake. It sorta settles. And frozen raspberries are kinda juicy...even though I froze them myself a week earlier, so they weren't at all mushy. When I got my cake out on Sunday to put the finishing touches on it, it was sitting in a pool of blood...or at least raspberry juice. I didn't think to take a picture earlier, but this is what it looked like with the juice sopped up from the sides.Not quite what I had in mind. And not so pretty.

I whipped up the last portion of frosting and set about fixing this monstrosity. And it didn't turn out too poorly, if I do say so myself.It even tasted great. And Daddy had a nice birthday - playing soccer with the kids at the school, playing four square in the driveway, going on the little rhyming treasure hunt I put together for him to find his new hanging chair for the porch, having a quiet dinner at one of our favorite restaurants and even getting a few straggler presents today.

His dad got him a new camera for his birthday. What do you think that means? New camera for the blog!