Birthday Cake by Steve

As I mentioned, my birthday was Saturday. Steve surprised me by offering to make me a birthday cake. He let me pick any kind of cake and he'd make it. From scratch. I gave him the chance to make it from a box, but he said he'd do a scratch cake. Even though I've never seen him bake anything, he's not a bad cook, so I figure he could handle making a cake. Cakes are pretty straight forward in their preparation.

I picked a chocolate cake recipe from Baking by Dorie Greenspan and a vanilla frosting with orange from the America's Test Kitchen Family Baking Book.

Then I put my feet up and watched the Red Sox-Yankees game while he got to work.

I missed getting pics of him making the cakes, but here they are cooling. He weighed the cake pans as he was filling them to make sure he got the batter evenly distributed. Usually I just eyeball it.

After the cakes cooled, he made the frosting, frosted the cake, and then decided to get fancy. He reserved about a cup of the frosting and dyed it light orange. Then he got out my pastry bag and used it to pipe some decoration on. How utterly surprising this was to me!





















The finished product was cute, pretty, and tasted great. Thank you Steve!