For those of you just joining us, I wanted to bake a cake for my kid's birthday, but not having done so before, I started with a test cake last week.

Throughout the week, I vacillated over what sort of frosting to make. My kid didn't really seem to care what the frosting was, so long as it was pink. I had just decided on making a cream cheese frosting, when suddenly the birthday girl announced she really wanted lemon frosting. Lemon cream cheese? No thanks.

Okay. Real frosting. How hard could it be?

Well, here's my disclaimer: I may be a housewife, but when things go wrong, I've got a mouth like a trucker. I'm going to put the rest of this post behind this link, so don't say I didn't warn you.

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I started with the standard cast of characters: milk, eggs, butter, et cetera -- plus a cup of coffee to steel my nerves. (The phone is there because... I forgot to take it out of the shot.)

Said ingredients turned into two cake layers:





I have to say, I've baked some downright shitty cakes, but this recipe from One Cake, One Hundred Desserts is, as they claim, pretty foolproof. The cake it makes is (with maybe one exception) the best thing I've ever baked.

On to the frosting!

I used the recipe for Fluffy White Frosting from Coconut & Lime. I had avoided this recipe initially, because recipes with the phrase "soft-ball stage" tend to give me one of those stress-induced eyelid twitches. (Or, if you want to be scientific about it, they're also called blepharospasms. Hooray, science!)

I started by beating the egg whites together with a pinch of salt while the sugar and water boiled into a syrup.

Now, I know I've mentioned before that I'm prone to doing a paralyzing amount of research before I try anything new... so why did I not stop and check how long it might take a syrup to reach the soft-ball stage?

I dribbled a little syrup into a glass of cold water and... crunch.

"Oh, fuck! Dude," I exclaimed to my husband, "help me out here - pour the syrup in!" As he was poured the syrup in, I stood beind the hand mixer, watching it pour in: "Oh, no. Fuck. FUCK. SHITTING H. FUCK!"

Why the potty mouth? Check out the syrup that remained in the pan:

Yeah. That's not good.

Still, I kept beating (and swearing at) the frosting, hoping these big chunks of sugar would somehow magically dissolve themselves into lovely frosting.




As you can see, that didn't really happen. (I picked out that obvious gigantic chunk there after I took the photo, but you can see how gritty the rest of it is.)

Now, don't get me wrong -- this is certainly not the fault of the recipe. Any fault lies solely with me, who blithely stood at the stove watching the syrup boil away for ages before even thinking to check it.

At this point, I knew I had to just accept my frosting's fate and soldier on. I tinted the frosting, added lemon flavoring, then frosted and decorated the cake. The frosting and decorating were much more enjoyable than I expected. I bought an offset spatula to frost this cake with and it was so easy to frost evenly with a minimum of crumbs. My piping technique could use some work, but check out that nice frosting job.

Not bad for a first effort.

So, what did I learn from this whole experience? Quite a number of things:

• Hot milk sponge cakes are indeed pretty foolproof.
• Sugar goes through the various stages pretty damn fast.
• Owning a candy thermometer is not a bad idea.
• An offset spatula makes frosting a cake, well, a piece of cake.
• Lastly -- and perhaps best of all -- four year olds don't know frosting isn't supposed to have crunchy bits in it. Suckers.

And finally, one last shot:

Happy birthday, kid.