baking day!
For someone that will not use an oven I LOVE to bake, but since I won’t use the oven I can only bake when I am 100% sure that someone will be home to help me. With my birthday happening this week and having this weekend off and being able to spend time with my fiancé Ryan, I was making myself a cake! i’m not against buying cakes is 100% an option but again I like baking so to me I wanted to make myself a cake, kind of like a gift to myself that all it really costs is a bit of time. so for today I decided to make a yellow cake with chocolate frosting from scratch. I got my recipes from all recipe.com because I do not have any tried and true family recipes for this one.
so we have to start with the cake of course, preheated the oven got the pan we were using greased and floured, I kind of got flour every where i’m a bit of a messy baker so having a towel around is mandatory. we mixed our flour, and baking soda, i’m reading some cooking technique books to learn more as I go so i’ve changed the type of salt i’m using so was a little concerned with the salt content, thankfully it ended up ok.
next we mixed shortening and sugar together, now this specific recipe calls for shortening but if it had called for butter I would have used a butter alternative such as plant butter because my fiancé is lactose intolerant so I will be using plant butter and lactaid milk so that he can have cake as well. after mixing the sugar and shortening to a light and fluffy texture we add three eggs individually mixing between each one, now I tried to be fancy and crack the eggs one handed so I didn’t have to worry about the hand mixer, the first egg went find the second egg I had to fish half the shell out so the third one I cracked regularly.
after eggs we wanted to combine wet dry and the milk, so I did it in thirds, a third of dry mix, third of milk mixed, another third dry mix, another third milk mix, last third dry mix last third milk mix. after that we stirred the vanilla extract in and then poured batter into cake pan. and this point I had a lot for spoons and beaters and even a spatula that had cake batter on it and apparently the cake batter itself was mighty tasty or so Ryan made it seem.
we bake the cake at 350 for 40 minutes and it came out perfectly, and now I say we because putting it in and taking it out was done exclusively by Ryan as again I don’t touch the oven. after the cake came out of the oven I wanted to let it cool before icing because I have learned a lesson about frosting too early, i’ve accidentally made the sleeping beauty cake before so cakes need to cool.
after the cake was cooled we started on the frosting and the frosting proved rather easy but again messy I ended up with cocoa powder every where. to start we mix melted butter and cocoa powder, and again its plant butter. then we add the powdered sugar, I would recommend not adding it all at once I kind of made a small smoke cloud of powdered sugar by adding it all at once. we also add the milk at this point again lactose free milk. the final step after all that is mixed in is to add vanilla extract in and we were almost out of our extract so after the designated amount I added just a bit more as we had way less than 1/2 a tsp left so just added that little extra in. but once the vanilla is added its time to ice that cake!
both the actual cake recipe I used as well as the frosting recipe will both be added to my permanent stores of recipes and I will be making it again because it was DELICIOUS!
