birthday cake!

I am a little reluctant to blog about cake because I know that Carolyn will be reading this, and since I've been promising her a baking lesson since around December, she might be a tad upset that I went ahead and baked without her. But trust me Carolyn, this cake was a recipe from my Cakelove cookbook, aka high maintenance cakes.

Drew likes anything with nuts and since hazelnuts are his favorite, I baked him a hazelnut sponge cake with a hazelnut crunch buttercream.

So like I said, the recipe is from Cakelove. Cakelove is a nice enough cookbook, but the cakes are sort of high maintenance, so I've dubbed the cookbook my "special occasion cookbook." Seeing as how I've only baked two cakes from it and they've both been for Drew, I guess that this is a "Drew cookbook." The cakes are pretty good, but the recipes tend to call for ingredients that I just don't always have on hand, like brandy or rum. And despite what you may have heard about me, I don't have hard liquor just laying around. Actually, I just lied to you. I think I do have some small bottles of brandy and rum laying around in my spice drawer.

Anyway, for this cake, I toasted hazelnuts, removed their skins, and ground them up with powdered sugar to make a hazelnut powder. The buttercream is unlike any frosting I've made before. Rather than beating together butter and powdered sugar, I simmered milk with the hazelnuts, strained the nuts, and whipped the milk mixture with egg yolks, hazelnut liqueur, and brown sugar. Then I slowly beat in a pound of butter (I'm not kidding you). Finally, I added in toasted, crushed hazelnuts. The buttercream was light and fluffy, despite there being a pound of butter in it. I like knowing how to make buttercream with butter and egg yolks. I usually make buttercream with butter and powdered sugar, and that yields a denser frosting. So, it's nice to have an alternative that's lighter.

The cake turned out wonderful and smelled divine. I'm not gonna lie- I felt like a badass baker after baking it.