cake, cake, cake.

There's a cartoon floating around out there, perpetuating this myth that pie is better than cake over the long run. It's kinda funny, in a I'm-someone-who's obsessed-with-pie-and-I'm-going-to-express-my-rage-in-a-nsfw-cartoon, but I have to tell you its a lie.

Cake is so much better than pie. Fact, pure and simple.

Which is why I volunteered to make my own birthday cakes (yes, plural) for my week long celebration of birth. I may or may not have a slight obsession with making cake. It's really fun. And I'm really good at it.

So, I thought I'd branch out from my usual, and try something new for our family celebration of my day of birth, which happened on Sunday.

Hmmmm, what kind of cake have I not had in a long time, that I'd really like?

Boston Cream Pie! (And that is irony, due to the aforementioned preferential treatment of desserts, and that Boston Cream Pie isn't really Pie!)

I didn't use some special recipe but just the plain one out of Joy of Cooking. You can find it, on page 732, which then lead to pages 714, 755, and 794. (So annoying.)

Follow what I did in the following fotos:

Premiere, le gateaux:

Shiny cake pans, covered in shiny fake butter, or whatever the heck Pam Baking Spray is made out of.

Some buttah. Some people are real sticklers for unsalted butter when they bake. I'm not. Bring on the sodium!

Dry ingredients! Including nifty cake flour! Hey--guess where I shop?

Stuff that goes in with the buttah. Delish.

Secret Ingredient! (And uh, what buttermilk is low-fat? Seriously?!?)

Before assembling all the dry ingredients, I had to sift the cake flour. If you were unaware, cake flour has the consistency of powdered sugar. It's fluffy and has the tendency to clump and after sifting, there is more than you measured out. Magic indeed. However, I was lacking a sifter...so I used my jumbo colander. Still did the job. 

Here we creamed the buttah, sugar, eggs, and vanilla.

And then you add the dry ingredients alternating with the buttermilk. Except I forgot to alternate. Oops. I think it still turned out ok. Fluffy huh?

Golden and Delicious! Success!

Next, Pastry Creme!

I can't quite remember what's in this. There are definitely egg yolks. Oh and some flour. Maybe some salt or baking soda? I dunno, look it up. The objective was a light yellow color though: mission accomplished.

Then the exciting part: watching milk boil. It's so much more fun than watching water boil. (sarcasm)

After this, I combined that light yellow stuff and the hot milk, put it back on the stove, and started whisking as the cream starting thickening at an exceedingly great rate. I didn't have a third arm, so I couldn't take a picture.

Then, the next day, after letting things chill for awhile, I made the chocolate sauce. I didn't take pictures. I was over taking pictures for the prep part. Sorry.

But not for the big reveal! Voila!

Oh yeessss! Boston Cream Pie! And it tasted good. Today, when eating some of the leftovers, my brother Harrison told me, "I am DOMINATING this cake."

Which in man-speak of course, means, I really like your cake.

This is my kitchen. You can't see the counters very well, but they're laden with specks of buttermilk cake crumbs, pastry cream, chocolate butter frosting and every dirty bowl (read: all my bowls) in my house. Between this and making THE strawberry cake for our ladies' craft lunch tomorrow-- I've effectively destroyed our kitchen.

le sigh.

(But! Isn't my new blog layout nifty? I got it by logging into draft.blogger.com and clicking the design template button. Its new!)