Bake Off '08

My daughter is on a baking kick. Not the sort of kick where she deliberately hunts for the perfect recipe, musters the energy to locate the exact ingredients and carefully concocts a cake using speciality ingredients like cake flour, and extra fine sugar, but the kind of baking that requires just a handful of ingredients and the opening of a box.

I think by now we can all agree that "the box" can replicate the time consuming, step-by-step, handmade variety quite successfully. My favorite is the Betty Crocker Caramel Turtle Brownie mix.

My daughter is partial to butter (flavored I think) cake topped with milk chocolate frosting. The simplicity of adding eggs, water, and butter are perfect for a teenage girl, and the hand mixing isn't as chore-like as it sounds.

The other day, she blended and mixed the ingredients for a perfect cake. After it cooled she opened the tub of milk chocolate frosting and began to coat the top of the cake with perfectly smoothed strokes of chocolate goodness.

I had stepped out for a bit and left my husband in charge of seeing the frosting of the cake to fruition. My mistake. My husband is the one in the family who wants a cupcake before I have the opportunity to attach the two foot tall mound of frosting to the top side. He is also the one who, when he orders a slice of cake for dessert, eats the cake part and leaves the chocolate shelf of frosting, in my opinion the best part, on his plate. What? For the love of frosting, what is he thinking?

I left explicit instructions with my daughter to use the entire tub of frosting for the cake. When I returned, the tub of frosting was sitting on the counter with 1/3 of it's contents remaining. The audacity!

The cake had thin parts poking through the meager layer of frosting where I actually saw the color of the cake. Can you imagine? Before I could conjure up some reason as to why the cake sat practically nude, I grabbed the tub of milk chocolate frosting, and finished dressing the cake. I scraped every last speck of frosting from the tub, leaving nothing. Perfect.

I'm sure that it is no surprise to you that in my opinion, there is no such thing as a cake with too much frosting. From now on I will have to be in charge of the frosting application for any and all cakes. A job I take very seriously.

Comments

Occasionally, someone will remark, as we're eating a dessert, "Ooh. This is too rich for me." And then they leave the frosting. And that is when I know who the alien is in the room.
Jodie Howerton said…
Can one be an equal fan of frosting and cake? I personally believe that too much of either ruins the whole affair....

Hoping this doesn't ruin our friendship....