This baking venture may have been doomed from the start. From prep work to finishing touches, I never quite had a handle on the situation. In the middle of the four-hour fiasco, I just started laughing. Little else could have possible gone wrong.
First there was the matter of the butter. After sitting out all day, the butter was not yet soft, and I had not yet developed patience. So I did the only reasonable thing and attempted to soften three sticks by the dining room heat register. Then I promptly forgot about them...
Did I mention that I left them to melt on top of a bowl of egg whites? Well, I did.
Moving on: After managing to salvage my butter and egg whites, I attempted to mix my dry ingredients with a hand mixer. I mixed, and mixed, and mixed. For TWENTY minutes I mixed. It became obvious that my half-melted butter was not going to cut it, so I nixed the hand mixer and tried mashing the ingredients by hand. After another ten minutes, I had a somewhat clumpy cake batter. Good enough.
While I let the three layers of now-questionable cake bake in the oven, I set to the strawberry butter cream icing. Believe it or not, I dismissed the option of using strawberry jam, and actually opted to try this from scratch. Shocking, I know. First I hulled, pureed, and mashed the strawberries. So far so good.
Next came the reduction, which also went without incident. Remarkably. The next trial occurred when constructing the rest of my icing, which seemed to need more strawberry reduction than the recipe implied. Laziness again set in, and I decided it was good enough. I really should be known as "The Mediocre Baker." I may change my blog name to include this more apt description.
After the cake came out of the oven (unevenly baked of course) it was time to ice. At this point, I had been making this cake for three hours. That is ridiculous. Just saying. However I mustered up some patience and put to use what I learned from my last cake: do not attempt to ice until the cake is completely cool. The first right move of the evening, I think. The cake was still incredible difficult to ice, with such thick frosting; however I managed a half-mangled rendition of my first (and maybe last) butter cream cake. Apparently it tasted delicious (or at least that is what I was told by co-workers, who ate the entire thing). So, I will consider this venture a success. Just don't look too closely at the cake.
Lessons learned:
1) Butter takes more than a day to soften.
2) Softening butter via register on top of a bowl of egg whites is a horrible idea.
3) You can never have too much strawberry.
4) Butter cream icing is, just as its name implies, very very buttery. I do not like it.
