June 2016 Entries

I found the recipe itself pretty simple. But I had just had one problem: my baking tins do not come in pairs. I have one of which I thought it was 20cm in diameter (I wanted to have a bit higher cake than in the recipe), so I wanted to buy another one of that size. Lazy as I am, I thought it was OK not to take my baking tin with me to compare at the store and just bought one. I thought 20cm is 20cm, so I wouldn't need two new ones (Yes, I'm cheap, but I'm Dutch ;)) Apparently, it's not. Centimetres are bigger at one store and smaller at the next. So, I went and bought another one at another store. But, still lazy, again I didn't take my old baking tin to the store to compare. I thought I had it right this time. It was too big. So, there I was: three baking tins, none of them the same size. I ended up going to the two stores again with three different baking tins in a plastic bag. I returned the biggest one. I bought another smaller one and finally I had two the same sized baking tins and was ready to bake a cake. So far, so good. As I said, the recipe looks pretty simple to me. It was, but my oven isn't. It is too hot. So, when a recipe says: bake for 30-35 minutes, I have to bake it for 30. With my last oven it was the other way around. So I forgot. I baked the cakes for 35 minutes and they almost got burned! The almonds on the top were a nice shade of dark brown... Luckily, they were not black, so they could still be eaten. But the look of them! Argh! Hence, when I completed the cake I added something of my own. Not for being creative, but for purposely hiding the darkest of brown almonds... A load of powdered sugar, some whipped cream and two GIANT stawberries did the trick. Depspite the little things that went wrong, the cake was very much loved and made a nice present for my dear boyfriend. And we lived happily ever after ;)