Birthday Cake!!!

Yay guys!! You have no idea how much I have been ITCHING to make this cake. Week 2 at uni has been extremely uneventful, and I hate to say it, but I am desperate for the return of impending deadlines and somewhat moderate (dare I say high) stress levels so that I might regain purpose in my life once again. And because I have had basically nothing to do, I have been restraining from baking this until the last possible second so that the cake is baked and made fresh, not days ahead. 

I ended up compromising by allowing myself to make the jam and shell the pistachios on Wednesday. This simmered away on the stove with sugar until the raspberries had reduced and thickened.

I was waiting, as per the instructions, for the jam to part like the Red Sea, but after some time, I decided this could be helped along by the addition of a cornflour slurry to assist as a thickening agent - especially because I know jam setting sugar exists and I was using caster sugar only. 

I spent some time pondering whether to sieve or not to sieve. Would this remove the rustic aspect of my cake? To sieve it was, and I’m glad of that decision too because now I have a really glossy jam waiting in the fridge 😄😄

I then spent an entire episode of Gossip Girl shelling pistachio nuts. [This show is actually so bad, especially when you realise the cast are all adults pretending to be high schoolers, AND the characters who are literally pretending to be 16 are being served alcohol in bars throughout the entirety of season 1 despite the legal age in the USA being 21. Chuck Bass literally owns a burlesque club in the equivalent of our year 12.] 

I wrecked my thumbnails in the process, but it was still a satisfying job. I love the two-tonedness of the colour of pistachios. Also crazy how much of their mass is reduced when the shells are removed because I started with a 320-gram bag and ended up with 110 grams. Tbf some snacking definitely occurred.

I made the cakes on Thursday afternoon when I got home from uni. I had to stop at the supermarket for some extra flour and icing sugar, and also, surprisingly, sour cream. There were two recipes online for this cake that were near mirrors of each other, except one used Greek yoghurt and the other used sour cream. I've never made a cake with sour cream before, but thinking back to the Moroccan orange cakes I made last year, I found the Greek yoghurt made the cakes quite dense. I phoned my mum for advice (as you do), and told me she once made a lemon cake with sour cream it was really yum, so I opted for the sour cream version, and boy, am I pleased! The cake batter was so smooth and fluffy, consisting of creamed butter and sugar, eggs, some oil and sour cream (not really the healthiest, lol). The ground-up pistachio nuts also turned the batter into a really gorgeous green colour, which isn't really captured in the photos. 

I cannot even put into words how badly I wanted 3 layers for this cake. However, we only have two cake pans that are the same size. I considered cooking them in two goes and swapping out the tins between batches, but once I started spooning the mixture in, I wasn’t too sure if the pans were too big in diameter for the amount of cake mix I had to get them across three pans anyway. So, I continued with two layers only. Peep my avant-garde method of lining cake tins. I went for efficiency over perfectionism. 

The cakes came out so golden on top, pulled away from the sides, and smelt sooo yummy. I let them cool and then transferred to a plate, which I put on top of my Kmart spinny makeup storage thing to make my own turn table - this was a game changer guys. I did a very thin layer of icing, then made an icing border, filled the top layer with the jam I made, and put the second layer on. Then I did a light crumb coat and put this bad boy in the fridge to harden for the proper icing to be done. I should say that the icing is just plain buttercream which I added a couple spoons of the jam too and some vanilla extract.  

It was dark now so all my photos are shit. I did the outside layer and had sooooo much icing left, so I filled a piping bag with icing and set to work at making a mess. I have never piped icing onto a cake before, just cupcakes. So this was an experience. I don't understand how cake people do this with one hand while spinning the cake with the other. I did a bottom border, which is all I had initially planned to do then, though, WELL, WHY NOT, and iced a top border, too. I don't know what type of piping this is called or if you could even liken it to a proper kind. 

I sprinkled it with pistachios too !! BEHOLD...  the finished product in the daylight. It was sooo yum, but I am not going to write about that because this is already really long. Comment the word potato if you read up to here and then I'll know you're a real one. 

A/N: guys my blog is sooo ugly. HELP !!!