Cake!

Inspired by the excellent Junior Masterchef Australia, my sister and I decided to bake a cake for the first time. The cake we chose was an ambitious one: Four tier chocolate layer cake with chocolate cream cheese frosting. We bought all the ingredients and supplies, including stuff we didn't have like a mixing bowl, a sieve, and cake tins. We couldn't find an affordable weighing scale or any baking paper, so we had to wing it.

Mixing the ingredients was tiring since we didn't have a food processor, but it didn't turn out too badly although we didn't have buttermilk so we used regular milk. We filled the liberally buttered cake tins (to make up for the lack of baking paper) with the mixture, put it into the oven, and started on the icing. Mixing the cream cheese and butter was even worse than the cake mix since it was so thick. The end result was pretty darned tasty though! It would probably be fluffier if we used a food mixer but it had a nice taste and consistency.



We were feeling pretty good about ourselves, but then we checked on the cake and to our horror, we found the oven had malfunctioned (ACK!) and wasn't hot at all! Refusing to let the cake mix go to waste, we ran out - in the rain - to buy a new oven (a little electric one) from a nearby shop. New oven preheated, we popped the cake tins in and hoped for the best. After a tense 45 minutes, we tested the cakes and found them a little runny, so we gave it five more minutes. One of the cakes was a little lop-sided and they weren't as tall as they should have been, so we decided to make it a two tier cake instead. We had used 14cm tins instead of 12cm as prescribed, so maybe that was a factor. The bottom parts of the cakes stuck to the containers a bit too.



My sister's enthusiasm got a little ahead of her and we put the icing on too early before the cakes cooled off, so the icing melted a little and we couldn't assemble it. We let it cool for a bit before assembly.




Since we had too much icing, we put icing around the sides as well.



With the icing on, the cake looked pretty good! After cooling more in the fridge, we set it on a nice plate.



The proof of the pudding (or cake) is in the eating, and it was .... edible! The frosting was nice even if the layers were a bit undefined. The cake itself was very dense. Perhaps with a little more baking time and a food processor, it might have been better and we could have made it four-tiered. Still, for a first effort, I'm pretty satisfied.



I foresee more cooking in the future!

:)

I'd like to stay and have my first Champagne...?

Fortunately, Captain Von Trapp isn't here to be a total buzzkill, so the answer is an emphatic YES.

Every year for the past few years, I've bought a bottle of wine to celebrate the end of the year. I'm not much of a drinker, but hey, it's New Year's Eve. This year I bought, for the first time, a bottle of actual Champagne - a half-size (37.5 cl) bottle of Laurent-Perrier Brut. It cost a bomb at RM119, but it's been pretty good year and I've always wanted to try Champagne.

In the first few seconds of 2011, I had the most expensive drink I've ever had in my life... and it was good. Quite different from other white wines I've had, there was a sweet aroma and bite from the carbonation. I wouldn't say it was worth the price, but it's something to be experienced at least once in your life.

Happy New Year, world :)
Let's hope it's a good one!