April 29, 2010

Disastrous Birthday Cake :P










I met my best gal friend, BK at Plaza Singapura, Tea Cosy for her belated birthday dinner. Tea Cosy is a mixed retail and dining outlet selling vintage classic furniture and ornaments. It's a nice, cosy place for high tea sessions or lunch/dinner gathering. We had dinner on that day and the food was quite average, in our opinions. Their high tea set looks more appealing so I migh be going back for their cupcakes and scones another day.

Ok...what is happening to the birthday cake that I baked for BK? Hehe.. as you can see from the photo, one side of it sank and the entire cake kinda swayed to one side, as if an earthquake had caused a landscape to be destroyed... or shall I say it's like ice caps melting? Yes I think that should be a better description... because that was exactly what happened. The Mousse cake melted.



My plan was intially to bake a chocolate layer cake. But BK told me that she had a bad cough. So I thought i had better not bake a chocolate layer cake that would most probably have made her cough even worse. Without insufficient time to get other ingredients, I decided on a green tea mousse cake.
I took this picture of the cake baking in the oven because I knew I had overbeaten the egg whites so I was monitoring whether the cake was baking well in the oven. It looked fine even until it was out of the oven but..... as with most chiffon cakes, some only sank when you overturn the cake to cool; some will not sink until you unmould the cake. I think this has got to do with the stability of the beaten egg whites. Some could still managed to "endure" without collasping in the oven but eventually they had to, while some were too weak that they couldn't hold one more minute inside the oven. I was hoping my over-beating could still sustain the stability..... So what was the result?

Well, I have some extra batter so I poured some in another small chiffon tin. The ones in the chiffon tin collasped badly, still eatable but as you know, it becomes moist and kueh-like. The other one in the round tin shrank a little, but still looked perfect. Although it wasn't the best texture that it should be, it still looked and tasted good. :)

I then got myself going with the green tea mousse. The recipe was taken from Florence's matcha yoghurt mousse cake. I have not had much good experience with making mousse cakes, so i do not know whether it should be the correct texture or not. The green tea flavour and colour wasn't that distinctive also because the powder could not dissolve well in the mixture. :(

My only decorating ingredients revolves around strawberries and chocolate. I know its very boring. Hehe... anyway, strawberry is a versatile ingredient isn't it? sorry my dearies, till when I'd improve my decorating skills, you'll still be seeing strawberries :P
When I reached Tea Cosy, I immediately asked for the mousse cake to be kept in their fridge as I knew the mousse cake was already melting. When we were finishing our dinner, the chef/waiter came to us telling us that the cake had melted badly because I should have told them that it was a mousse cake and it should be kept in the freezer instead. We told them that's fine and we would just like to have the cake served to us. They gave us a socking look with their eyes wide open" Are you sure? Its going to look quite bad."
So they took out the cake, placed a candle and even had it lighted up! Haha we weren't really expecting this, really. We thought we would just have a little photograph and enjoy the cake to ourselves without making a "scene" about the birthday cake. It was no wonder why they had to make sure whether we really wanna have our cake served. :P

Anyway, we do not really mind whether eyes were on the weird-looking cake. It tasted quite delicious actually. Because of the use of yoghurt, it was a rather refreshing, mousse cake rather than a creamy one. ;)

5 comments:

Unknown said...

oh gosh...but still...i wont be able to make such a cake...so still well done :)

Aimei said...

heh thanks for the encouragement Rita!

sherlyn said...

I left after I left the comment in your proposal post that night. Too tired, so now I am revisiting. I can't stop myself to tell you that the deco is really nice. If only I can do such pro deco, simple yet so nice.

Aimei said...

Thanks Sherlyn! Your words is really an enouragement! Cos' i really think i dunno how to deco at all... haha ... :P

sherlyn said...

You and HHB always say you all don't know deco, but all the deco of the cakes that you all made look so pro. I think I must copy again the next time I hv the chance to bake a cake.