Monday Meals - Cake Edition

Happy Monday to you! I was a busy bee in the kitchen yesterday, doing some prep work for Lucy's upcoming 3rd birthday party, which will be a Princess Party at home.

Years ago, way before I even thought about kids (well, who am I kidding? - I've been thinking about having kids since I was 13, but anyway ;-), I found a cake pan at Williams-Sonoma outlet that was a castle mold. Paid a crazy amount of money for it, saving it just for an occasion as this. (I actually used it to make a castle cake for her 1st birthday, but it wasn't a theme, so it didn't fit quite as perfectly as it will for this birthday ;-)

Anyhow, I wanted to do a test run since I had the idea to make the cake aqua blue, since Lucy's favorite princess is Ariel, and the tablecloth has a huge Ariel under the ocean on it.

Let me just say how glad I am that I decided to try it out first, because it turned out terrible. Not the taste - it was very yummy- but the cake browned so much as it cooked that, well...just see for yourself:




You can see the "turquoise color " I was going for where the kid and Jason tore into the cake, but obviously, the brown color is YUCKY! It's too bad, too, because I really like the turquoise color, but I can't get the cake not to brown as it cooks...

My original plan was to use a sheer glaze for the icing, since I didn't want to cover up all the neat detail created by the mold.

After deciding that the aqua cake was a "no-go," I thought to just make a blue glaze and put it over a new cake that was not tinted with food coloring.

Obviously, this is the dirty blue cake, but I wanted to see what the glaze would do, and I don't like how it turned out either. I still covered up too much detail and looks messy:



But, round 2 of a new cake batter - free from any food coloring - did produce a nice golden-brown cake.



So, I'm sticking with the golden-brown color, and I'm just going to have to do a clear glaze. I don't think the aqua glaze will look good, and I don't want to go through another round of making a batter that calls for 3 whole sticks of butter, 4 1/2 cups flour, 6 eggs, and 3 cups of sugar and a whole new mess in the kitchen to clean up just to test out IF the blue glaze will look okay. I don't think it will anyway ;-)

But the good news is that this cake does taste SO YUMMY! And it's a very simple batter to make. So, it's my recipe for today's "meal."

My favorite part of this recipe is that this website allows you to enter in how many servings you want, and it automatically calculates the new measurements for each ingredient. And since I was multiplying the recipe by "3," the conversion was much easier done by the computer ;-)

Happy Baking!