Father is getting older

My family hardly celebrate each others' birthdays. Don't talk about 21st birthday because it's different. The most we did was to buy a cake and cut it either at home or at my grandma's place. Even my mom forgot that it was my father's birthday... until I reminded her.

After being a failed daughter for 20 years, I decided that I should at least put in some effort into his birthday and not just grab a cake while I'm on my way home. I was THINKING of baking a cake for him. BUT, I never bake a real round cake before... Thanks to my impulsive actions, I bought a whole lot of ingredients and spent a bomb so I couldn't really give up.

First, I had an idea of making a rainbow cake. Happily noted down the ingredients to get from Kaykay's blog and made my way down to Phoon Huat at Marsiling to buy the needed ingredients and materials. Jeng jeng jeng, got everything but I was so lucky the gel colouring went OUT OF STOCK. Damn sian because I've already gotten almost everything. The plan had to go on. I tried to call the branch at Clementi but they kept hanging up on me whenever I say "gel colouring" wth? I went ahead anyway to get the remaining items and to check if I can still get the colours. Sigh, luck wasn't with me and it started pouring. Carrying the bags of ingredients and braving the rain home.

I know I had to execute my plan anyway so I adapted to the recipe for the basic cake. Wanted to go ahead with a normal round sponge cake without colourings but that would be too boring. Sometimes I will underestimate the recipe thinking that baking can never go wrong if I follow strictly to it. Ended up decided to follow the rainbow cake recipe and did layer by layer. Not 6 layers, but only 4, since I don't have the colours there's no point making so many layers. The sponge cake is in boring yellow so I added cocoa and coffee powder to flavour/colour 2 layers.

As for the frosting, I followed Kaykay's method of adding the extra cocoa powder and melted choc. She used 80g of milk choc. I bought 40g of milk choc and 40g of dark choc. I was munching on some raisins while waiting for the cake to bake, and threw some raisins into the frosting mixture as well. Then I saw one last ripe banana lying on the kitchen counter so I chopped it up and mixed in the frosting.

When the 4 layers of cake are ready (I baked them separately as I only have one baking pan), I was shocked to realise that the sizes of each layers are different even though I used the same pan (7-inch). HAHA. So I tried to cover up the flaws by spamming the frosting.

The frosting melted quite quickly and it was quite a mess. So I decided to cover up all the flaws by spamming dark choc rasps. Here are the photos if you can't figure my language.

Final product full of flaws

Happy Birthday to Papa!!

2 layers of choc cake and 2 layers of sponge cake

If you realised, the cake is slightly slanted due to the uneven sizes for each layer

Look at the 2nd layer (from top). It was a smaller layer so I had to spam frosting at the side

You can see some raisins and bananas

I requested her for this pose HAHA.

Anyway, they said it tasted good but I believe that it's because I just took it out of the freezer so it was similar to an ice cream cake. I don't know what went wrong... The cake was super dense, especially the choc layers. I suspect it's the additional cocoa and coffee powder. The next time round (if there is... or for anyone who wants to try this out...) I think it's better to cut down on the amount of cake flour to balance out with cocoa and coffee powder. Don't really know how this works because most of the time when I modify the quantity of ingredients, I go by hweeling one ah...

My father even asked me to make coffee for him so that he can slowly savour the cake! Hahahah. It was quite sweet... Because I used the cake pre-mix, I couldn't alter the amount of sugar. Even though I used a small baking pan (7inch only), each slice looked quite big because of the 4 layers...

I guess... it's not so bad for my first real cake! I made simple fruit cakes/chocolate steamed cakes before but not a full cake with frosting. Can't really blame me if it tastes bad... Practice makes perfect... but I think I will just buy a cake from the bakery the next time.