Beautiful Baking for Birthday Boys

Birthday baking is actually just an excuse to have bowls to lick clean and leftovers securely stored in my refrigerator while the flour suspended in the air hangs around me like an edible halo. My aura is all-purpose and self-rising.

First up was the decoy cake; I pulled the old 90's sitcom trick where it seems like everyone has forgotten your birthday/nobody cares about you and then bam! Friday! Laser tag! Zach and Kelly had the whole thing planned and Screech had no idea! But in the interests of not crushing self esteem into a fine powder and sifting it in with the dry ingredients I thought some baked good was necessary. With that I give you the Leaning Tower of Strawberry Angel Food Cake:

I'll save you the how to on this one; suffice to say it involves a rigorous process of selecting which cardboard wrapped box of pre-prepared mix to use. I chose the one where you only have to add water so I wouldn't have to buy oil and eggs. While the president's choice on the stimulous package was generous, apparently his stance on cake mixes is more conservative.

Also, I used angel food cake mix but cooked it WITHOUT the appropriate circular pan with that large phallus in the middle. My phallic free pan did just fine and contrary to popular belief the world did not explode. One more point for feminism.

To cover up the botchy cutting job I covered each layer with a generous portion of whipped cream because I prefer it over frosting and while the cake was made for someone else the baker reserves the right to make it however she damn well pleases. Plus, bikini season is fast approaching and you know what that means: high fat foods with extreme sugar content. However, my hand mixer is still broken and whipping all that cream by hand was my work out for both last month and this month.

In case you were wondering, the angle atop the food cake was indeed a chocolate covered strawberry which I managed to make even sans double broiler. This is ingenuity at its finest:

That is a pot, with a sieve on it, holding a bowl to melt the chocolate. Ghetto foodie.

Blurberries.

So the next day was the actual paaahty for which we made Vegan Cookies and Cream Cupcakes. The recipe came from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, but I also found it here. FYI, the last line of the recipe actually reads, "Shortening and margarine are totally good for your digestive system. Just ask my bunghole." Mmmmmm, vegan poop.

Anyway they looked super cute and have oreos in them which is always a plus (oreos btw, are vegan because they are entirely made of chemicals. Eggs = bad. Mono-nextrose-bicarbonate-polysaturated-glucomate = okay. I prefer dead baby birdies, but to each their own).



Hapeee Berthdaaay!