Birthday party part II

Phew! Mission accomplished!

We've just thrown Lucas' first birthday party. Today came grandmas, grandpas, aunties, uncles and cousins. It was an exciting, exhausting, cheerful, festive, funny, chaotic, turbulent and lovely party. 

Our little birthday boy has experienced so many new things today that he went to bed voluntarily and fell asleep almost immediately. 

My self-imposed job was to make some fun birthday cakes and try some new recipes. On Martha Stewart I found this incredible looking cake called Moist Devil's Food Cake:

It looked fantastic and there was a picture of the cake layers, too. They were about 5cm thick and the whole recipe sounded easy to do. So I started converting ounces, cups, sticks, inches and fahrenheit into grams, mililitres, centimetres and celsius and began baking. But when I took the first pan out of the oven I was kind of disappointed. My layer was only about two centimetres thick and I didn't know why, so I decided to repeat the whole process twice to get three layers. This took much more time than I had planned, but I must say that the cake layers turned out to be very juicy so that it was worth the effort.

The moist devil cake cream scared me a little bit. I was afraid that it would be too much chocolate (if this is possible). And I wanted to make a funny looking cake and the chocolate frosting wasn't exactly what I was looking for. So I whipped some cream and added a little mousse au vanille mix. After arranging the cream and the layers I covered the whole cake with a marzipan coat. Because of its yellowish colour I covered the marzipan with a thin layer of white frosting. Then I dyed some marzipan with food colouring and cut out a few dots which I put on the cake. Finally I formed a bow to complete my present birthday cake. And tataaa! Here it is: 

I was really satisfied with the result and found it tasted good. Even though my sister-in-law found it a little too rich - well, she didn't know the original moist devil's food cake recipe with all the chocolate :-) 

It really was a "light" version of the original recipe! :-)

But the second cake I made was a dissapointment! 

I found this great idea on smittenkitchen.com and immediately wanted to give it a try:

But again I don't know what went wrong... instead of juicy brownies I got superdry crumbly cakes. :-( I had problems when I cut out the stars because the edges broke easily. My only explanation is that either my dough was too thin so that the cooking time was too long or there is another kind of flour in the United States - what would also explain the flat cake layers of the Martha Stewart cake. Well these are my "brownies" which were more a birthday table decoration then a tasty treat: 

But I didn't want to finish this baking report without giving you my favourite marble-cake.recipe. Do you know marble cake? It's really popular here in Germany and got its name from the nice effect you get by mixing a chocolate and a vanilla dough. 

I made this for Lucas birthday on tuesday and as always it was a success: 

Ingredients: 

250g unsalted butter, plus more for the pan

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla sugar or 1 tablespoon of pure vanilla extract

1 pinch salt

250g sugar

4 eggs

500g flour

1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda

1/8l (125ml) milk

50g minced almonds

50g minced dark chocolate 

40g  dutch-process cocoa powder

2 tablespoons rum or a few drops of rum flavour

4 tablespoons milk (for the dark batter)

2 tablespoons confectioner's sugar (to decorate)

Preparation: 

• Heat oven to 180°C and butter the cake pan.

• In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream butter on low speed until light and fluffy. Gradually beat in sugar, vanilla sugar and salt until light and fluffy.
• Drizzle in eggs, one at a time, beating between each addition.
• In a large bowl, sift together flour and baking soda
• With mixer on low speed, alternately add flour and milk to the batter
• Put half of the batter into another bowl. 
• Add the almonds to one of the doughs and mix all.
• In another little bowl mix the chocolate, the cocoa and the rum. Add milk and stir.
• Add the chocolate mixture to the second batter and stir until everithing is mixed.
• Fill in half of the vanilla batter into the pan, then fill in the brown batter and finally fill in the rest of the vanilla batter. 
• With a fork or a little woodstick stir spirally through the batter in the pan to obtain the marble effect.
• Bake for 90 minutes. 
• Let cool the cake and decorate with confectioner's sugar.

And there was a little sewing, too, this week. I made a birthday garland. I thought it would be a nice little fast craft but again it turned out to be more work than I thought. At first I wanted to sew some letters on the triangles but I wouldn't have finished right on time for the party. And now I think that it's prettier without them because they would have covered the nice fabric. So here it is:

Although it took some time because of the many parts it was really easy to sew and it embellishes every party location. So give it a try!