Harold's BIrthday Cake

I interupt talking about last weekend to put up Harold's birthday cake. This cake is so incredibly good. Let me tell you where I got the recipe from. A few weeks ago I went looking for a peanut butter brownie recipe online and came upon her blog and her recipe. That was it. I was hooked and I signed up to get regular emails from the Smitten Kitchen blogger, Deb. And she does an unbelieveable job of bringing us, her readers, her escapades in her small New York City kitchen that doesn't even have a dishwasher.

Fortunately for me I signed up just in time to experience her making a wedding cake for her friend. She wanted to give her a great tasting cake, not just some old humdrum dried out been sitting there for days wedding cake. I'd been following her creation for a couple of weeks and wanted very badly to try it out.

What better excuse to make this cake than for Harold's birthday? When I asked him what kind of cake he wanted he told me a yellow cake. When questioning a chocolate cake, after all, I'm female and adore chocolate, he told me that if I wanted to make a chocolate cake for me to go ahead. But if I was making one for him, well, he wanted a yellow cake.

I was able to take Deb's vanilla butter cake recipe along with her Swiss buttercream icing recipe and came up with the above pictured creation which is a three layer vanilla cake with Swiss buttercream icing. Now I'd read in Deb's many comments from more than one person that the icing recipe would/could collapse after beating it for 15 minutes and that you just had to keep beating and it would pull together. Mine didn't collapse when it started pulling together although I beat that bugger with my kitchen aid hand mixer for at least 20 minutes. But ooo la la, the taste of it all. It was totally worth the effort. I just added some fresh strawberries for appearance.

I'm not going to try to copy and paste and credit and whatever all Deb did with her cake that turned out beautifully. But I did give you the link in an above paragraph. Just click on the words wedding cake. I'm betting you're going to enjoy her blog as much as I did if you like going in your kitchen. Her story telling and her husband's photography are superb!