Wee Feast

I just had a birthday recently. And yes, I made my own cake. It was a lovely day.

When I was tiny, my cafeteria used to serve yellow cake with chocolate icing once every couple of weeks as the dessert portion of the meal tray. Yellow cake with chocolate icing became an instant favorite.

I used Smitten Kitchen’s Best Birthday Cake recipe, and it was amazingly delicious. I even called up more than one person as I was mixing the batter (by hand…for the last time…that’s right, I got a Kitchen Aid mixer as a present) to remark on how perfect it was. “It’s like a pound cake, with a tight crumb and a nice density. But it’s really fluffy too!” After I bored friends far and wide with the batter, it was on to the frosting. I liked the sour cream frosting, but I think I will stick to buttercream in the future. It gives it that diner cake flavor that I particularly enjoy.

Here’s one of the cake layers cooling:

And the finished product, in all of its frosted, sprinkled glory:

Now I’m dying to know: what is your favorite birthday cake?

I do my best to get my  money’s worth from the groceries I purchase, so having bought some light cream for the vegetable pot pie I made this week, I had about a cup and a half to use up before I go on vacation this weekend. Cream scones fit the bill, since you use milk fat instead of butter fat, and bittersweet chocolate sounded sweet but not too sweet.

The recipe’s from Alice Medrich’s Bittersweet by way of Pittsburgh Needs Eated, a beautiful food blog with a wonderful selection of recipes. I couldn’t get my scones into that cute triangle shape, so settled for the standard “drop” style. They look like homemade scones, not Starbucks pastries, and are much more moist and delicious.

Read more…?