Birthday guest post by Edward: it IS rocket science

I turned 31 yesterday. It was a great day - I came home from work to my friends having arrived from Canada for a visit, plus lots of lovely cards and presents - and a cake! I had been harassing Ed about this for awhile, but didn't actually think he would make one. But not only did he make one, he blogged it! Here's his guest post on the making of my birthday cake. Just a warning: if you don't know Ed, you may not "get" all of his expressions... he's a bit different.

It only seems fair I should make Hilary a birthday cake after the genius creations I’ve had for my birthdays over the years. I can solve the time-dependent Schrödinger Equation and hold my own in a conversation about the Higgs Boson, so why is baking more like mysterious witchcraft?

I’ve gone for this carrot cake.

Only just this morning I had KitchenAid come and pick up Hil’s mixer as it needs servicing. They are very good. I rang them with the model and serial number, and they knew it was well within warranty (we’ve had it three years at least). The bad news though, I have to make this cake without it!!

Method:
Go to Sainsbury’s and buy everything on the list in the book, even if you’ve probably got it in the cupboard already, this saves time looking for stuff when you’re not really sure where it might live in that strange room with the oven in it.

Open a beer. Find your bottle opener attached to your keys, and with the usual leverage motion, ease the cap off along with the nerves of what is about to go terribly wrong.



Measure out all the ingredients into individual bowls, because that’s what they do on the telly, it looks good and makes for a good photo. A stroke of luck I discovered is to grate the carrots into a colander (I was running out of bowls) but this lets all the juices run out, and I had a nice puddle of carrot juice to slurp up off the work surface underneath. Move your phone out of the way first, flour doesn’t come out of the iPhone very well.

What is the metric measure for ‘light and fluffy but not too white and meringue-like’?

I think cake mix stain in the recipe book is OK, makes it look used, and I don’t think I’ll be in too much trouble for that.

Feel free to deviate from the quantities, mainly the cinnamon, because it’s minging. There also seemed to be far too much oil going into this, so I didn’t put as much as it said, only time would tell if this would be my downfall. There are also no walnuts in the cake, I don’t like them, and this is my cake.

Bish, bash, bosh, in the oven… write blog post, finish beer, tidy up the mess.

Mixing butter with cream cheese without a mixer is impossible; I’m so cross I’ve had to stop just to write this paragraph. This has stopped being fun now! Oh, hang on, wait, bingo, two metal forks and a stabbing motion!

I left the cake in a bit longer than it says, because the book thinks I am making individual smaller cakes, and the knife I keep poking in never comes out clean… again, not very scientific, this. I must recount my adventure to the chemistry teachers at school, this is all very similar.



It came out of the tin!!! IN YOUR FACE…. CAKE!!!