Happy Birthday, Christina's Dad

It's been a while since I featured a guest post, but it was worth the wait. This one is a sweet doozy (yes, more cake) from an old friend and one of my most faithful readers and troubleshooters, Christina.

Hello Second Dinner readers!  Katya lived across the hall from me way back during our freshman year of college . . . and I have lots of fond memories of Katya that involve food.  She baked cookies in the grimy dorm lounge, hosted latke parties every Hanukkah, and spent lots of time talking with me about Vidalia onions and pomegranates.  So I’ve been following her adventures here with interest.

I just entered a period of "funemployment" after three years of long hours at work, and so I’m making up for lost time in the kitchen.  Now, I’m a pretty good cook and an okay amateur baker.  But even though my cakes always taste fine, they look like they were beaten with the ugly stick.  Uneven layers, cracks, crumbs in the frosting – can you say "hot mess"?

Imagine my surprise when I was able to produce the following for my dad’s birthday.

For the first time ever, I managed to bake a cake with a lovely shiny coat of frosting and no messy crumbs poking through!  I was so ecstatic that I had to share my good news with Katya, who kindly offered to display my efforts here. 

I followed the chocolate layer cake recipe featured at Smitten Kitchen (using the adaptations for 9-inch cake pans) and it baked up like a dream.  The layers were nice and even, and super-moist.  I made sure to thunk the pans on the counter a few times before baking as per the tips over at SK.

Things always go awry for me once it comes time to frost, probably due to my lack of patience.  I’m bad at crumb coats and always have trouble spreading buttercream without ripping off layers of crumbs and getting them scattered all over the place.  So, this time, I made sure to bake the cake the day before my dad’s birthday in hopes that the layers would be easier to work with at frosting time.  I cooled the layers completely before wrapping them in plastic wrap and then left them in the fridge for 24 hours.  I also decided to try a chocolate sour cream frosting (again featured at Smitten Kitchen) in hopes that I would find it more amenable to spreading. Well, it worked like a charm.  Frosting this cake was practically effortless since the frosting was so light and easy to work with.  Nary a crumb peeked through AND it was absolutely delicious.

My dad loved the cake and thought it tasted even better on day two than on the day it was cut.  I think the taste of the sour cream kind of mellowed out a little and melded better with the cake layers.  But the best thing about this cake is that it has magical properties.  We were able to keep this cake under a dome in the fridge for TWO weeks with no signs of it going bad or getting a stale taste.  (My mom can’t eat chocolate and I am limiting my consumption of sweets, so there was a lot of cake left for my dad to tackle.)  This is the everlasting gobstopper of birthday cakes!

Many thanks to Katya for letting me guest blog and share my cake-baking excitement.  At her urging, and with some trepidation, I will attempt pane genzanese next!

Guests

Being a foodie, even a fairly mild one, can get boring. There are days I spend a lot of time in self-ridicule because I spend more time with cookbooks than literature, more time on food porn blogs than following politics or even gardening, which somehow feels more virtuous to me. I certainly do want to remember to give more time to exercise, to school, to writing, and to activism, but the guilt about the food is slowly fading. It's not a passion to eat expensive ingredients, it's a passion for making things with my hands to feed to others and to eat. It's a passion for the physical act, a craft project or more broadly a creation. I'm creating a lifestyle, and while I have to be careful to make sure it doesn't entirely consist of food, life does literally revolve around food, and in New York it's too easy to let that food be rushed, overly expensive, and bad. Don't get me wrong, it's also possible to have wonderful, impossible food here at any hour of the day or night, but more often the results of my commutes and schedules are poor, and I just eat to put things in my face.

Thus my kitchen can be more than a fun project, it's the beginning of a larger revolution, one that's expanding to include the garden (such as it is), and the world out there. Some people, especially those I don't see on a daily basis, are taken a little aback by my obsessions with food, and I in my turn am taken aback when others who aren't so hooked in to the foodie world take perfectly reasonable exception to the constant use of butter, expensive ingredients, and meat. (I really am trying to create sustainable eating habits, especially now that there are fewer people in the house.) Other friends and I spend hours talking about our newest techniques mastered and dishes explored. I'd like to invite friends and relatives from all sides of that spectrum to contribute guest posts to Second Dinner. Some of them, probably the foodies, to be honest, may stay on as regular guest contributors. A few of the most eager have already volunteered, and I'd like to invite more.

Just leave a comment on this post if you'd like to participate, or email me your contribution, complete with photos. I'm opening this up because, as I mentioned above, this is a conversation I'm having, a conversation we're all having, and this blog is for discussion and also for proud display. I'll welcome individual contributors as they come, but for now, welcome all.