daring bakers march challenge: dorie greenspan's perfect party cake

'The photograph on the dashboard, taken years ago.' - REM, Nightswimming

This month's Daring Baker challenge was hosted by Morven in New Zealand and she chose Dorie Greenspan's Perfect Party Cake. Dorie Greenspan's recipes popped up all over the internet last year when this book was first published and it's been on my cook book wishlist ever since. So I was pretty happy to get a chance to make one of her recipes as part of something where I absolutely had to get in the kitchen and do something.

It's funny actually, thinking about life in retrospect, I always associate it with food. Growing up we had a cook at home who did all the 'boring' cooking, so anything my mom or I made was more complicated or a dessert or a cake. I got to mess about in the kitchen and someone else got to clean up. Perfect huh?

When I started dating Nick, my first love, I was a little less than enthusiastic about him. He wasn't my type. I thought he was all wrong for me and that he would break my heart (which he did). He was rather persistent about getting me to go on a date with him though. He called me one evening while I was baking a cake, which needed taking out of the oven. After a few minutes talking, I said 'I'm sorry, I really need to go now, I'm baking a cake', to which he replied 'and I'm flossing the cat' and hung up! I don't know if that was the moment that I stopped being resistant to being pursued but it was pretty funny. He never believed that I was really baking a cake, even after we'd been together a while. Obviously I have no doubt at all that he really was flossing the cat.

Back to Dorie's cake. I enjoyed making this recipe, but I think the differences in ingredients here in Europe vs. the USA really came to the fore in this recipe. First off, I used English baking powder and the cake barely rose, which is why it's two layers instead of four.  The flour was also a problem I think. Even though I used patisserie flour the texture was somewhat grainy instead of the superlight texture the cake should have had.

The buttercream split when I was beating it, and it separated a little on standing, but I think that was because I didn't cook the egg white/sugar mixture long enough over the double boiler. I've made swiss meringue based icing before, but this one was a little more difficult to achieve a very smooth result with. I'll be trying it again though to see if I can improve on it.

Those things aside, this cake actually improved with standing. The buttercream was much lighter than I expected it to be and the texture of the cake was no different on the Friday after baking than on the Monday when it came out of the oven. I especially appreciated the opportunity to use up half a jar of raspberry jam that had been standing in the fridge for ages.

My only complaint is that I ate almost the entire cake on my own! Definitely a thing to make for a group of people or to take to work. I just don't want my colleagues to get too spoiled, especially after the hot cross buns of the week before. And let's be honest, I liked eating the majority of the cake on my own. Not sure about my hips and thighs though ...

You can read other daring bakers' adventures in cake baking over here. See my last challenge here. You can find the recipe here.