Time flies so fast… another year gone by in a blink of an eye… Little One is 3 already. As she has been going to the daycare centre 3 times a week to play with other children, I thought it would be a great idea to celebrate her birthday with her little friends and the adults there.
This year I decided to try my hands at making a layered Chocolate Cake. Never done it before so I was kinda stressed and excited about doing it. Woke up at 8.30 am on Tuesday morning, plunged straight in getting the cake ready by lunch time – didn’t even have my breakfast. The first cake turned out perfect as I expected. As I only have one 9″ cake mold, I had to wait for the first cake to cool down before baking the 2nd one. Impatient me couldn’t wait for it to cool down completely and thought it would be alright to unmold the cake after 10 minutes (forgetting that the weather isn’t winter anymore but summer climate). Aaaahhhhhh! No! No! No! … Top half of the cake turned out on the wire rack while the other half stayed stuck onto the mold. What a disaster ☹️! Little One heard me screaming and cursing… came running into the kitchen, saw her birthday cake and said: ‘oh no, mommy, my cake is broken. Never mind mommy. We can still eat it.’ Awww… isn’t she such a little sweetheart. Yes we’ll eat this broken cake at home.
So I just told myself ‘Don’t panic. We still got time to do another one’. I had to check the fridge to see if we had enough butter and eggs to make another one. Phew! We did. So off goes my 2nd cake into the oven. Timer went off, took the cake out and saw that the cake didn’t rise as much as it should. I was so totally disappointed. Oh no! Not another run of bad luck. Not today of all days, for goodness sake. I just wanted to cry. Sometimes the more we want everything to be perfect, the worst it turned out to be. ☹️
It was about an hour later before I got over my disappointment and got myself busy baking the last cake. While the cake was baking, I realized why my 2nd cake didn’t rise as much. I left the batter sitting on the counter top way too long waiting for the cake mold to cool down. I forgot that chemical reaction of the baking powder in a wet batter. Anyway, the 2nd cake still tasted as great. Off I went about making my chocolate icing. This time around, I left it in the fridge for a longer time and got the consistency I wanted. 😒
Well, I had no problem in spreading some chocolate icing on the first cake… now how to flip the 2nd cake on top of it without getting it broken into pieces? This chocolate cake is soft, moist and delicate… Holding my breathe, I turned the 2nd cake slowly and gently out onto my right hand. Placing it as delicately onto the first cake as possible without messing the icing on the bottom cake. Phew! I did it… quite pleased with myself actually 🙂. Looking at the cake, I realized that the 2 cakes although they were baked with the same mold, didn’t turn out to be the same size. The top one was slightly larger than the bottom one. Arrggh! For a while, I toyed with the idea of slicing some bits here and there to make the cake look perfect like the ones from the bakery… in the end, I decided against it. As the saying goes: if it isn’t broken, don’t try to fix it. Glad I heeded that advice for once 😉. Spread the rest of the icing around the cake, topped it up with fresh strawberries. It looked PERFECT. Off it went into the fridge to keep the icing cool until it’s time to bring it to the daycare centre. Little One kept coming to the kitchen asking if we can put the candles on her cake now so that she can sing her birthday song and blow out the candles. 🙂
Brought my beautiful chocolate cake to the centre… only to be told this: ‘What a beautiful cake! Did you made this yourself, mdm?’ ‘Oh, I’m so terrible sorry, mdm but we can’t distribute this cake to the other children in case of any food poisoning arising from it. We will celebrate and blow out the candle, your child will have a slice of her cake and the rest of us adults will take a slice of it too but we can’t share it with the other kids. I’m not saying that your cake isn’t good or properly done, it’s just the rules. We can only share cake with the other kids if the cake is bought sealed in a package from a factory.’ Bon! If only I knew this bit of the rules. I guess gone were the good old days when our mother would bake cakes, cookies etc and bring them to our school to share it with our friends and teachers.
