Monday, February 22, 2010

Papercutting and a story about cake

Yesterday was Adam's birthday! Happy birthday, darling!

2010.02.21--Goodnight papercutting for Adam-1.1

Here's the gift I was hinting about last week: a special papercutting project! This is really the first papercutting piece I've done, and I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. Though I did discover that I need a better knife for next time!

20100215--goodnight papercut-13

I may have mentioned this before, but every year I try to make Adam a birthday cake. He loves chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, so that's what I do. And every year the cake has been an epic failure. I mean, I will eat nearly anything with sugar and/or chocolate in it, and even I have not been able to eat some of these cakes. I haven't been able to figure it out, though I suspect that at least part of the problem has been overbaking.

Anyway, this was going to be year number six (I think...that seems right) of my chocolate cake attempts, and if it didn't work out, I was ready to finally give up and start buying his cakes from a local bakery or something. Because, seriously, how many times can a girl force her husband to eat really bad cake on his birthday just because she has a crazy thing about baking cakes from scratch?

So this year I decided to avoid the recipes in all my fancy-pants cookbooks and go with a more populist cake: the recipe on the Hershey's cocoa box, also available on the website. (I just saw this morning that Angry Chicken posted a link to this recipe over the weekend, too. If only I'd had her recommendation earlier, I could have saved myself years of heartache!) Hallelujah, we have a winner! It wasn't dry! It tasted good! Adam voluntarily had a second slice, and I didn't even prod him in that direction! Success is mine!

2010.02.21--Hershey's chocolate cake for Adam-1.3

I also used Hershey's recipe for frosting (again, available on the cocoa box or on the website, on the same page as the cake recipe). It was pretty good, but maybe a little too sweet. I'll probably stick with this cake recipe in the future, but I might mix it up on the frosting front.

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