A Series of Unfortunate Events...

I've baked a few cakes in my lifetime, mostly chocolate ones - Black as midnight, the Chocolate Chestnut bomb and Molten Chocolate Babycakes. But I freely admit I'm not a dab hand at decorating them. I did get enthused a few years ago and buy myself a set of decorating tools but many of those were soon pilfered by my then two-year-old and then I figured I'd focus on content rather than presentation. So it was a huge challenge for me to participate in the Daring Bakers challenge for March of baking the perfect party cake and decorating it with butter cream.
Of course, I had a few other challenges during the process. For one, our electricity supply has been erratic, to put it mildly, so I'm never sure when it's ok to pop in a cake. As it turned out, over the long weekend, we had power long enough to bake a few potatoes, but about 10 minutes after I'd huffed and puffed and popped the party cake in, the power went off for over half an hour. I was in a real quandary because I didn't know whether I should re-mix the cake batter to get it airy again. Eventually I didn't, so I'm not sure if the cake turned out as light as it should have.

Then I needed to cover the layers with raspberry jam but I butter-fingerily dropped the jar and smashed it, so I had to use blueberry preserves, which were much thicker and full of whole blueberries - delicious but not very spreadable. I also forgot whether I needed egg whites or yolks for the icing and used up the whites by mistake, so I had to separate another bunch of eggs - we had a loof scrambled eggs last weekend as a result. Being really untalented at decorating cakes, I overdid the blue food colouring so I got a deep blue instead of the pale colour I had wanted.

The only mishap that I was anticipating but which didn't happen was that the butter cream icing didn't curdle. It came together beautifully, white and fluffy and was great fun to use.

I used some blue-coloured coconut flakes for the sides of the cake and a handful of hundreds and thousands came in handy to cover the top of the cake where the icing was slathered on roughly.

I must admit that the cake was a huge hit. Mom loved it and didn't cotton on that the icing had raw egg whites in it - in fact, she commented that there was no smell of egg. A's office pals and my colleagues were impressed that I'd actually decorated it at home. And I find myself already contemplating doing this over for my daughter's birthday, if only I can get someone to come along and decorate it for me!