Finally some cake!

You know what I love to do? Make my own birthday cake. Some people think that's crazy. I think it's charming, but I'm a little biased. So, a few weeks earlier, when my birthday rolled around, I decided to break out my brand new Gourmet Cookbook (given to me as a present by Meredith) and make the "All Occasion Yellow Cake" with "Chocolate Ganache Frosting." Sounds good, right?

Cake:
2 cups cake flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 stick unsalted butter, softened
1 cup sugar
3 large eggs
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3/4 cup whole milk

Frosting:
3/4 pound bittersweet chocolate
1 cup heavy cream

Before I start - this was the only cake flour I could find.


Whole Wheat! To make a cake! That was not what I intended. But that's what they had at Whole Foods, and I figured the "cake flour" part was more important than the "whole wheat" part. How did it turn out? Well, you'll see.

1. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Butter and flour two cake pans.


2. Sift together flour, baking powder and salt.


I didn't actually sift it. Shhhhh. Don't tell Ruth Reichl.

3. Beat butter and sugar together with your really old and kind of dirty hand mixer until it's light and fluffy.


4. Add your eggs one at a time and keep beating it! Add the vanilla too.


5. Add some milk.....


6. Then some flour....


7. And repeat so that it goes milk, flour, milk, flour, milk, flour.

8. Put your batter in the pans and bake for about 20 or 25 minutes.


9. Cool for 5 minutes in the pan and then flip them out to cool on a rack.


Make your frosting while the cakes cool - it's super simple. Simmer your cream and pour it over your chocolate chips. Here are mine.


Whisk it up until it's smooth and refrigerate it for about two hours - until it's thick but still spreadable. If you make it too hard, just take it back out of the fridge and wait some more.

Spread it over your cake like so:


My friends started to eat the cake before I took a picture. Whoops. That's the sign of a good cake though! It was all gone about ten minutes later. The whole wheat flour was undetectable - just the way I like it. Nobody knew it was whole wheat! Well, until now. Darn.