My First Cake… Made From Scratch

Last week I went to the library and checked out Mastering the Art of French Cooking.  I wanted to check it out and read some of it before I bought it.  It’s very good.  Lots of teaching.  So, since we were planning to attend a cookout this past Saturday night I offered to bring dessert.  I thought it would be great to pick out one of Julia’s recipes and make it.  I decided on chocolate sponge cake layered with a custard based butter cream icing.  I followed it to a tee!

I started by properly  coating the pans with butter and flour.

Next, I worked on the egg yolk mixture.

I beat the egg whites while the chocolate and coffee mixture melted on the stove.

  (A perfect peak if I do say so myself.)

I then folded all the different parts together and put it in the oven.

While the cake was cooking I worked on my custard based butter cream icing.  This was the first thing to go wrong, or so I thought…

So, being the optimist that I am, I thought why not make it like a glaze (as pictured above) and then I’ll pick up some cool whip, slap it on top, and it will be wonderful!

 

I was wrong again.  It only took one bite for me to realize that when a recipe says that you can use either coffee or rum it means brewed coffee.  My cake had four tablespoons of coffee grounds.  Oops.