Birthday Party

So, after all those trials about which birthday cake to make, it came time for the actual party. I made a big spread, much too big for the amount of people there, and of course forgot to take a picture of the whole thing. Here is part of it at least:

I had chips and salsa, chips and a few dips, cheese and crackers, fruit salad, veggies, pigs in a blanket (pigs in blankets? how do you pluralize that?) and cupcakes! 2 kinds of cupcakes, to be exact. Chocolate with chocolate frosting, and maple with maple frosting.

The chocolate definitely was the winner. The baby ate 1 of each, but whatevs. You only turn one once, right?! Next year, I will just plan on chocolate though, to save myself trouble. Anyways, who am I kidding? Nobody wants to eat stuff that isn't chocolate.

Birthday cake, test 2

A girl at work gave me the incredible idea of making cupcakes instead of a real cake. I decided to try it out for test number two. I took the recipe for a maple cake (from 'Bon Appetit' of course) and made cupcakes out of it. I just randomly picked a time to start testing to see if they were cooked through. I think it worked well and I decided that this would be the winner for the party, but K is giving this recipe a thumbs down. The only thing he doesn't like is the frosting though, because it is cream cheese based, and he hates that. Now I don't know what to do. My options are to make these and another kind of cupcakes so people can choose, just make another kind altogether and ditch these maple ones, but I think K may be the only person on the planet to hate cream cheese frosting..... hmm.... to be continued, I guess.

Birthday cake, test 1

In a little over a week from now, my baby will have his first birthday... yikes! So, as you would expect, I am baking the cake instead of buying one. Since I didn't really start baking until about a year and a half ago, and I haven't ever made an actual cake, I decided I need to do some testing before the big event. This is test one. I didn't have very high hopes for it, but decided to try it just in case. It is a vegan chocolate and orange cake. Recipe out of 'Bon Appetit', again. I got a subscription for Christmas and am putting it to good use!

I didn't quite know how a n eggless cake would be, or how it could even be done, but surprisingly, there weren't that many unusual ingredients in it. In fact, I pretty much had everything I needed, except for the vegan "butter".

The cake looked really good, all frosted and everything.
After conducting a scientific taste test, K and I decided it wasn't bad. He liked it better than I did, but really, my main complaint has because I am not a big fan of chocolate and orange. Why didn't I leave the orange out seeing as I knew this ahead of time? Don't ask me! Anyway, the cake was kinda crumbly, but moister than we expected. And the frosting was a nice consistency, and kind of hardened up, which we both liked. This cake isn't going to be the birthday winner, but it was a fun test.