Bubby is 21, and his Cake! And cupcakes.
My Bubby turned 21 this year! Whether or not we're living in a Simulation the passage of time, ever faster, is the only thing we can count on.
It was a joyous occasion and celebrated with a cookout attended by folks from all areas of his life, including friends and teachers from high school and now college. He hasn't been this excited and happy since, well, his high school graduation a year ago!
For the occasion we "inaugurated" our new patio, though with a bit of trepidation because thunderstorms were in the forecast. We set out chairs on the patio, and figured the rain would hold off long enough to grill, but we didn't dare set out the food and hold the entire party in the yard. This worked out nicely enough since in our house you can easily transition from living room to sunroom to patio.
With the threat of rain, we put the food out on a table in the sunroom. There were peanuts, in a beautiful Polish pottery dish I inherited from my mom's best friend, a dear family friend who was always there for all of us and who passed away a few years before Mom. There was a variety of chips including potato chips, nacho chips and corn chips. And there were meatballs in red sauce warming in the crock pot, and lemonade and water. We grilled hot dogs and veggie burgers and accommodated some gluten-free requests too. The sunroom was decorated with a "21st Birthday" tablecloth and bright hanging spirals with a star at the end that I put on the sloping ceiling beams. We had lots of seating everywhere and it looked very cheerful.
The guests had fun tossing frisbees around in a large circle while R* grilled, and sitting and chatting with each other on the patio. It was a nice mix of groups of people who knew each other and who were new to each other so equal parts getting acquainted and catching up. No one was a complete stranger to everyone but also not same old same old to everyone.
The opening of the gifts was so much fun and Bubby was so happy! He read every card out loud, appreciated every gift and thanked the person offering it. He loved being in the spotlight. And his face when we sang Happy Birthday! He looked stunned that all these people were here for him, almost overwhelmed, but happy at the same time.
I'd invited people from 4 to 6 pm, then extended it to 6:30. R* had warned me that was too short, and we had such a good crowd that it went by too fast, really. But by the same token, it's better than a party that drags on, and not only that but about 15 minutes after the past person left a tremendous thunderstorm was unleashed, with lightning right over our house. So I think it worked out well in the end.
And the cake! WHAT a production of hits and misses!
When Bubby first told me he wanted a Pistachio Cake my first reply was that it wasn't a good idea because many people might not like it. Then I realized, what the heck? This HIS birthday and he must have the cake he wants!
In looking at recipes and ideas I finally settled on a pistachio cake with Raspberry Filling, a Raspberry Buttercream crumb coat and an outer layer of Mascarpone Buttercream.
Originally I wanted to make a 9" cake because I wasn't sure how many people we would have. I'd made 6" and 8" pistachio cakes but never a 9", so the first order of the day for me was to look for a 9"-inch recipe. I found this recipe from Preppy Kitchen. I followed it to the letter and when I took the cakes out of the pan I was horrified. Each layer was only about half an inch tall! I'm not sure what went wrong, because Preppy Kitchen is usually a trustworthy source. I've made many of John Kannell's recipes and have never had a problem. The recipe calls for 4.5 cups of flour and a tablespoonful of leavening (2 1/4 tsp of baking powder and 3/4 tsp baking soda) so where did it all go? The problem may have been that, after sitting out for several hours, the butter was too soft and when I whipped it for 7 minutes then added in the 4 eggs it all seemed to separate. When I saw this, I put the mixture in the refrigerator for a while until it all firmed up... but maybe that affected the rise? Still, the cake wasn't unpleasantly dense or anything. The other issue with this recipe is that it just didn't have enough sugar: only 2 cups for 4.5 cups of flour. This affected the taste, and maybe also the rise. The problem could also have been my year-old baking powder, though I doubt it because I've used it recently without a problem. Whatever happened, I knew immediately that I had to find another recipe because I couldn't use these pancake-like layers! This contretemps certainly threw off my schedule of preparations, because I'd planned to make the cakes on Tuesday and freeze them for a Saturday party. I was busy all day on Wednesday and Thursday, and I knew I'd need Friday to decorate. But now, I'd have to burn the midnight oil baking on Thursday evening.
I ended up using the Pistachio Cake recipe on Sally's Bake Blog. Although it would yield an 8-inch cake, I'd used it before and knew it was reliable and reliably tall. Since this recipe also uses sour cream, less butter and more pistachios, and calls for more sugar, there's no way it wouldn't make for a better tasting cake. It wasn't as bad as I feared baking it on Thursday evening after I got home from my watercolor class, especially as I'd measured out the dry ingredients the night before. Plus, this avoided having to freeze the cake layers! It took about 27 minutes to bake, instead of 21-23 minutes as mentioned in the recipe. The cakes did bake unevenly, with one layer being almost underbaked and one being almost overbaked. I left them to cool in the pans for almost 20 minutes, vs my usual 15-minute rule of thumb. And I had a bit of trouble turning them out of the pan! I failed to run a knife along the edge of the pan, perhaps that's why. Another glitch is that I ripped the parchment off too quickly off the least-baked layer, and it took off quite a bit of cake. I "glued" this back on as best I could using my fingers, and left them to cool on the rack like that. When cool I wrapped them in plastic wrap and foil to stay moist so I could decorate them on Friday.
Sadly on the day of cake decorating, too much time is spent making frosting instead of on the actual fun part which is the decorating. I'm not a big fan of making frosting and getting it right has often been a bête noire for me. This time was certainly no different! I'd seen Sugar & Sparrow's recipe for Pistachio Cake with Raspberry filling and Mascarpone frosting. I loved the idea of mascarpone frosting because the flavor would enhance the pistachio taste so perfectly. Now I've made mascarpone frosting before using whipped cream, and it yields a delicious and light frosting. But for this cake I needed something sturdier and more pipeable and wanted to combine the mascarpone with butter instead of with whipped cream. Sugar & Sparrow's recipe uses butter, but only yields enough frosting for a 6" cake. I needed more than that to frost an 8" cake. I looked around online and found all kinds of recipes for mascarpone frosting, using all kinds of amounts of butter and mascarpone in all kinds of ratios. I decided to improvise a recipe combining Sugar and Sparrow and this recipe from a website I've never seen before, Owlbbaking. Well... that veered to catastrophe! The mascarpone frosting ended up being a horrible-looking, curdled mess. I think the problem came from the directions in the Sugar & Sparrow recipe. Every other recipe instructs you to first combine the butter and mascarpone and then add the confectioner's sugar. But in Sugar & Sparrow, you combine the butter and sugar and then add the mascarpone and I think this ruined it. The mascarpone failed to emulsify no matter what I tried: refrigerating it and re-whipping it; adding milk and rewhipping it; adding more confectioner's sugar and re-whipping it; calling the King Arthur help hotline twice. Nothing worked and eventually I had to face up to reality: there would be no mascarpone frosting.
Meanwhile, I'd already filled and crumb coated the cake using Sally's Bake Blog's recipe for raspberry filling, and the raspberry buttercream, from the Sugar and Sparrow recipe above. A note about the raspberry filling recipe: it certainly yielded enough to fill this 3-layer 8-inch cake and have plenty left over. I strained out the seeds, without realizing that the recipe specifies that if you choose to strain out the seeds you'll need 1 additional teaspoon of cornstarch. In spite of this the filling firmed up enough to use in the cake. I could just have made another batch of raspberry buttercream and left it like that, but I didn't want to have a pink cake for Bubby! So, I decided to make lemon buttercream for the outer coat. This way, we could call it a raspberry lemonade pistachio cake?
I used this recipe from Sally's Bake Blog for the lemon buttercream. It came together smoothly and didn't curdle in spite of using milk instead of heavy cream, since milk is all I had at hand. And I had just the right amount of lemon buttercream to frost the outer layer of the cake and a dozen cupcakes!
The overall design for this cake was actually very simple. I wanted to use this large topper I'd ordered from Amazon. I wanted to go with a simple sprinkle border on the bottom of the cake and the topper and his name on the caketop. Once the final coat of buttercream was applied, it was time to press the sprinkles in place along the bottom of the cake. I'd actually never done this before and found that I used up almost an entire jar of sprinkles! I applied the sprinkles by putting some on the palm of my hand and pressing my hand at an angle along the bottom of the cake. It was kind of unnerving trying to achieve an even coating of sprinkles and attempting to get the sprinkle border to have the same width all around the cake, but somehow I managed. Even though I used up almost an entire jar of sprinkles in the process! I went with these rainbow sprinkles from Whole Foods which don't use any artificial colorings.
I piped a 1M border along the top of the cake, and slowly poured sprinkles on top of this as well. I found out that for the border, less is more. The areas where I'd actually poured the most sprinkles didn't look as good and I ended up removing some of those sprinkles with tweezers.
The final touch was the letters spelling out Bubby's name. I ended up making these the day of the party when I had a million other things to do, and I ended up making simple chocolate letters using melted chocolate chips and this candy mold I have. I'd originally thought of making the letters out of fondant dyed blue and in retrospect I wish I'd taken the time beforehand because the chocolate didn't match the color scheme of the cake and it really bothered me. I hope no one else noticed! I do know people were happy to eat the chocolate letters, they were certainly tastier than fondant would have been!
Now for the cupcakes. A few days before the party I received requests from some of the guests to have gluten-free offerings. I decided to make a batch of gluten-free cupcakes. Gluten-free baking is not in my repertoire and I didn't want to buy gluten-free flour, look for a recipe, etc. I decided to go with a box cake mix, and found this inexpensive brand with decent-enough ingredients at a nearby Hannaford. I made half the mix, adding 1 tsp of vanilla and a 1/2 cup of sour cream in order to enhance it. The box says to bake it for 28-34 minutes, an inordinately long time for cupcakes. Thankfully I checked them after 20 minutes in the oven and they were ready. I was surprised at how little they rose, maybe because of the sour cream or maybe that's how they're apportioned. The box says it has enough mix for 24 cupcakes, but it really is a small portion. You could easily divide the entire box of mix into 16-18 cupcakes and have a more generous cupcake. These cupcakes were quite flat and unappealing-looking, as well, again not sure if the addition of the sour cream caused this. I think if I were using this mix again and adding sour cream, I would also add some baking powder. In any event, they looked just fine after frosting them with a 1M rosette using the leftover lemon buttercream frosting. It was exactly the right amount of frosting for these dozen little cakes, with only a couple teaspoons left over in the piping bag!
The cake got lots of compliments and people told me it was delicious. When I tasted it, I agreed it was very good but I also found there were too many competing flavors. The raspberry and the lemon were a kind of overwhelming and you couldn't really taste the pistachio. And the gluten-free cupcakes were delicious! Nothing really equals the taste of a cake box mix, does it?!
We had a wonderful time celebrating Bubby's milestone and days later he is still on a high. I was so happy to make his cake for this special day!
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