“Baking” vs “Cooking”

I think that I started my cooking career at a young age thinking that I loved to bake. Now as an adult, I realize that I do love to bake – although I try to avoid it often because I also love to eat my baked goods which leads to massive amounts of weight gain. As I have become a more talented cook I realize that I have a little bit of a knack of “styling” food – but not sweets (I admire those cake decorators even more!)

That being said – my father LOVES chocolate! For his birthday he said he wanted me to make him a cake like Susan’s Bakery (http://www.susansgourmetcatering.com/bakery.html) makes. I said that I would do what I could! So off to AllRecipes.com I went….

I found a recipe for double chocolate cake using Devil Food cake mix with chocolate pudding, sour cream, applesauce, eggs – yum! I made the cake (1/2 of it) in my 3 tier mini-cake-pans that I got for my birthday & put the other half in a square pan. My intention was to make a mini 3-tier cake and a flat square one. But when they came out the round ones were a little softer than I would have liked – so I created a “leaning tower” cake with them (with chocolate whipped cream icing – just add some dark chocolate cocoa powder & brown sugar when making your whipped cream & whip until it is thicker than “light” whipped topping).

Then I created the real cake that I served that evening. I cut the corners off of the

square cake. The next layer was created by putting two of those corners together to fake a square. The top layer was the smallest round layer from the 3 tier pans that I have. Icing the whole cake was pretty easy and getting a nice even layer and making it look even, but then tried to do some decorating. The dots are about as much talent as I have at this point! I hope that as I continue to progress in the kitchen, my “sweets skills” will advance beyond tasting great and with step into looking as good as they taste!

Happy Sweets 🙂