Making my own birthday cake

 

Today is my birthday. To be honest, it’s not the best day to have a birthday at the best of times (although hotels are very cheap, and there is no problem getting a table in those restaurants which are actually open), and this is clearly not the best of times. Even if we were willing to take the risk of going out, we’re in tier 4 and nothing is open. So, yet another celebration will be taking place in the house.

This also means making my own cake. If I’d been more organised, perhaps I could have managed to buy one, but I wasn’t. The husband did make a sort of offer to make it himself, but as he does not do baking, and requires heavy sous-chefing even when cooking in his comfort zone, doing it myself seemed simpler. I settled on a red wine cake with red wine and chocolate frosting, from The Wine Lover’s Kitchen, which also provided the recipe for Christmas dinner.

I decided to make a quarter of the recipe, as I want cake for today, rather than for the next week, especially as I have reached the point of Christmas consumption where I’m actually quite looking forward to eating healthy food again. This was a bit complicated, as the book is designed to accommodate American cup measures, so you end up with amounts like ‘125g/half a cup plus a tablespoon’, which is a bit irritating to begin with, but especially so when you’re trying to divide it by four.

You begin by making a red wine syrup – put ref wine and sugar in a pan, heat slowly until sugar dissolves, bring to the boil, then simmer until reduced by half. 

An inadequate amount of syrup

You then start the cake mixture by mixing half of this with cocoa powder to form a paste. I should have ended up – in my madly divided recipe – with a tablespoon of syrup, half for the cake and half for the frosting, but I had barely enough for this stage. I’m not sure whether I boiled it too hard, or if it’s just working with such small amounts sent everything haywire. Anyway, after scraping every drop from the pan, I did get quite a nice cocoa and syrup paste. 

Cocoa and red wine paste

After this, the cake is fairly easy: add butter, eggs (or an egg in my case) sugar and some self raising flour, and whisk together. Then fold in some more flour, place in a prepared tin, and put in the oven for 30-35 minutes. Even with only a quarter sized cake, it still needed the full cooking time, although my oven is slow.

Fresh out of the oven

Once the cake is out of the oven, make the frosting while it cools. Melt together red wine syrup (I made another batch), butter and chocolate over a pan of boiling water. 

Melting things

When all melted, remove from the heat and stir in icing sugar. You should end up with a lovely thick glossy paste. I did not – the curse of the syrup struck again and there wasn’t enough liquid for it to come together. This time I couldn’t be bothered making more syrup, so I just added some red wine which worked beautifully. You then smooth this on top of the cake and leave to set for a few hours, or in my case, overnight in a tin. 

The finished product, with frosting.

I haven’t eaten it yet, so can’t report on the taste, but having checked on it earlier it looks and smells highly promising. And I have candles to stick in it, which will be fun. I will try and post a picture of it with candles on twitter later, but no promises, as I intend to have consumed quite a lot of wine by that point.

Happy Birthday to me!