dissolved into something: Piece of Cake!

What's a girl's weekend without a little dessert? Answer: crappy. Well, lucky for us we happened to be celebrating my friend's recent birthday, which means one thing...birthday cake! Just a day before we headed to Hocking Hills my darling HLP turned 29! So we naturally celebrated with a gifts, balloons and a big cake. When Amanda and I were roommates in college, I would usually pick up a box of yellow cake and a tub of chocolate frosting from the store and assemble it into an oh-so-classy sheet cake for her. We were lazy college students, what do you expect? I don't even think we did candles or anything to decorate it...I just "made" the cake and then we ate it! And it usually didn't last long.

This year I wanted to do something a bit more special, so I decided I was going to make a cake from scratch! As much as I like to bake I've never actually made a cake or frosting from scratch, so I was really looking forward to it. I did some research and found a cake recipe and a chocolate frosting recipe (one my sister, who is allergic to cocoa butter, could have) with pretty good reviews and then I just jumped right in...

It's not the prettiest cake in the world, but I think it's not half bad for my first real cake. I think it tasted pretty good too! I was worried that the cake would be dry, but it wasn't. (FYI, I took a suggestion from one reviewer and immediately put the cakes in the freezer from the oven to halt the cooking process.) It ended up having a great rich, buttery flavor to it, probably from all the egg yolks. And the frosting was also pretty rich and chocolatey, though in hindsight, I wish I would have thinned it out a bit more since it didn't spread on very well. As for the lettering: I, unfortunately, couldn't find my piping bag for the life of me so I had to do the lettering with a ziploc bag. Oh well, it'll do.

Now I can't wait for the next birthday to come up so I can find another cake to make from scratch. I've already pinned a couple sound delicious...