Happy Birthday, Justin!

For Justin's birthday, I decided to make a checkerboard birthday cake. C.C., A's mom, used to make this cake when we were kids. Justin's birthday was the perfect opportunity to try it out this kit given to me by my friend, C !

Of course I had to start at about 10PM at night. I followed the recipe on the box (see above photo) because I didn't want to take too many chances and I thought the batter viscosity or thickness might be optimized such that the colors didn't run together.

Here are the basics for this cake:

1) Make 2 colors of batter that will go in three cake layer pans. This recipe added melted chocolate to the batter for the chocolate batter but I think food coloring could be really fun as well.

2) Alternate the batters in concentric rings using this special pan:

It was a little challenging to add the batter such that each ring is the same height. I wished there were little height marks. The batter was scoopable and spoonable...not pourable which was also a bit tough but you don't want the colors to run...

The divider has to come out before baking. I tried to lift it as perfectly as possible so as not to disturb the pattern. I also had a chance to smooth the rings.

You can see that you need to make two pans with the same pattern and one that is reversed. I thought they looked okay at this point.

Then I baked them...

and was a bit worried. They were a little domed which is normal but they looked off center!
The undersides were centered though...so I layered them and frosted. Now I actually tried to the level the cakes- without any special equipment. But it was coming up on 2AM and I was pretty tired and sort of forgot to really level the last layer. Here's how it looked:


I used sprinkles and edible green and purple glitter.


Hmm...not so great on the leveling. Perhaps it would be a whimsical, Dr. Seuss-eque cake. After all who knew what the center would look like.


So we lit the candles and sang "Happy Birthday"...

and Justin made a wish.

and it actually turned out pretty well!

The texture was very old-fashioned: a bit dry and very light. All in all, it was a success!


But I have to add one more photo for fun. About 12 years ago when I first started baking, I made this cake for J using food coloring. It wasn't checkerboard but it turned out really cute! I should try checkerboard with some colors! Yes, that is me with the really dark hair, my natural color!