Let Mother Nature Eat Cake!

At the end of April, Anchorage starts looking a bit like spring.
Snow banks disappear, and spring flora start making their debut. Families trying desperately to pretend it's already summer flock to the city's brown-grassed parks. The wild geese return and with their early morning squawks, seem to be signaling the arrival of spring.


At least all of this was true until this past Friday, April 25th when it dumped more than a foot and a half of snow.




The wintry scene that resulted would have been enchanting... in January. But in April, coming upon May, I could not embrace the winter wonderland with open arms.




What is the former Californian Madwoman to do in the face of such snowy adversity? She takes to the oven!




So I decided to pass the climatically confused weekend by baking cakes. The first was for the end-of-year taiko drumming potluck and performance. It has been an awesome year of taiko, with the exception of the cancellation of this year's Cherry Blossom Festival. To make amends, I made a cherry blossom cake and in the spirit of our Tomodachi Daiko group (which literally translated means, "Friends taiko drumming"), I included the character for "friendship" printed on the group's t-shirts and paraphenalia.




Those who know me well understand that it is no secret that sometimes I resort to cake mix, particularly when I have complicated decorations in mind. My favorite for this purpose, which I heartily and frequently recommend to others, is the Pillsbury Deluxe German Chocolate Cake Mix. Why Deluxe? It has pudding in the mix and produces a very tender cake. Why German Chocolate? It is much more subtle than a standard chocolate, a little less sweet perhaps in anticipation of its intended, very sticky sweet pecan caramel topping (which I rarely prepare). I find that the best complement to this cake is a simple, lightly sweetened whipped cream frosting. The sooner the frosting hits the cake, the sooner it seals in all the moistness. For this application, I stabilized the whipped cream for decoration using gelatin.


Stabilized Whipped Cream Frosting:


1 cup whipping cream
1 T unflavored gelatin


Dissolve gelatin powder in small amount of cold water in a glass measuring cup. Let stand for a few minutes. Heat cup in saucepan of boiling water, stirring until all gelatin is dissolved. Drizzle over whipping cream as you are whipping. Should yield about 2 cups.

Like any baking by the Madwoman, there are bound to be irregularities, and the Cherry Blossom cake was no exception. I had baked the cake the night before but did not unmold it until the day after. Bad idea. As a result, I had to carefully pry the cake out of the pan. I also may have overmixed the batter because the cake yielded a very tender crumb which was delicious to eat, but hard to work with in terms of structural integrity. That's why the cake in the photo is a slightly truncated 9 X 13 (I lost the top inch to disintegration during excavation). The tender crumb was seemingly so disastrous that I almost scrapped the whole cake. But the Madwoman is nothing if not resourceful in last-minute fix-ups.


The second cake was to celebrate Staff Appreciation week at my office and did not suffer as many irregularities. The recipe called for 3 layers of 9 inch rounds, but since I had only 2 such pans, I decided to just use 2 and then split them for a 4 layer cake. The closest I got to an irregularity in this endeavor was the batter was fairly stiff and hard to spread out evenly. For whatever reason, the cakes came out somewhat lopsided. I could have sliced off the tops for evening, but I hate wasting cake and these days, eating mistakes is a very fattening last resort. So I just sliced the layers and hoped for the best, having come to terms that if you want to make a pretty homemade cake, nothing says homemade love than a little lopsided layer.