This decadent chocolate Guinness cake slathered with a speckled, deeply nutty brown butter Swiss buttercream and doused in a whiskey caramel sauce is truly a celebration cake that is sure to make you feel happy! 30 is not the birthday that launches you harshly into your middle age. 30 is the birthday where you celebrate the end of an era – the 20s – where mistakes were made (lots of ugly ones), lessons were learnt (mostly in a bad way), discovering who you are felt impossible and highs of first real job, first serious relationship, first real apartment, first independent foreign travel were only dimmed by the lows of those ‘firsts’ not living upto their expectations. But there is a delicious excitement in goofing up and blaming it on lack of experience and naiveté. There is mystery and intrigue and desperation in finding out how your life will turn out when you are a grown up. When I turned 30, I told everyone that next year I will celebrate 29 and subsequently keep moving the clock backwards. Well, I didn’t do that. Forgot to buy 2 and 9 numbered candles. So here I am 31! Anyhow, who wants to repeat […]
Chocolate Chiffon Cake w Coconut Swiss Meringue Buttercream
A light and airy chocolate chiffon cake smothered in rich and luscious coconut swiss meringue buttercream I am lost in the world of sponge cakes. It entailed quite a bit of reading. What is a sponge? What is a foam cake? Sponge vs foam cakes? Oh are they the same? Ahhh sponge is a subset of foam…Wait, is it the other way round? Is there fat or no fat? What so many eggs!! I asked myself that while making the Angel Food Cake. You don’t have to know your butter cakes from your foam cakes. It is often just pleasurable to bake and eat a lovely cake. But I can’t let it go. I have to know! I have to read all those baking 101 articles, baking science, cake math. This is the part where my Mom will be both surprised and pleased. She really did have a hard time helping me with my math when I was in school. Yes I can do fractions now! Well if the schools had any sense, they would teach us mathematics by way of food. If you are obsessing over baking like me, here are some quick reads about types of cakes, […]