There has been lots of talk of cupcake making amidst my friends in the past week. For some reason I’ve been thinking about trying to make a cake and I decided today was the day. The day I make a cake, not from a box. Like by hand. A German chocolate cake no less.
Did I mention I was insane? Should I mention it again? I believe I should. I am insane.
Did you know that German chocolate cake is super freaking hard to make? Yeah, me neither. I’m now convinced it may be one of the hardest cake choices that there is. It has to be done in a certain way, you can’t just throw it all in there, like you do with a boxed cake. I tried so hard to follow the directions, but one of the first ones nearly threw me for a loop. Separate eggs? I’d never heard of that. I mean I’ve seen it done, because hai, I have a Food Network addiction. (Which really came in handy today.) But I’ve never tried it. I managed to do pretty well.
The second problem was when I realized I didn’t know which do-hickey thingy to use on my mixer. (Because really, box cakes can be mixed by hand.) I picked the whisky looking one. After five minutes, I realized it was the wrong one. Oops.
So I get all the ingredients in the mixer, in the right order and starts looking like it should. (Or well it seemed like it, to my never made a cake by hand, view point.) Then I read that the last direction is to whisk the egg whites until it has peaks. Okay, so I had to go online to look that up. Thank you Ask.com. (See Ben? I will get there.) Because, I had no idea what it was supposed to look like. I start whisking it by hand.
Guess what? You don’t want to whisk by hand. It’s dang tiring. All of the sudden, I remembered that I owned a hand mixer, from before I had a real mixer. Took me a bit to find it, but in minutes, I had egg whites with peaks.
Baking the cakes was easy. Although word to the wise? Check to see where your oven racks are, before you turn the over on and let it get hot. The frosting wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.
However, I skipped a small step. When the cakes cooled, I realized my mistake. You’ll see what happened in the pictures. Basically? When a recipe says, put wax paper on the bottom of the cake pans, just do it. Trust me. Thinking that it sounds weird and maybe that was only in the olden days that one did that? Yeah, not so much.
Either way, I took the cake that fell apart and put it as the middle layer. A very wise woman told me to just slatter the frosting all over it and it would be fine. She was right. Always make friends who know how to cook and bake. You never know when it will come in handy.
Guess what everyone? It tastes amazing. Issa can make a cake. I may be insane, but I can make one tasty cake.
