I told my mother I'll bake a butter cake for her for Mother's Day. Don't be fooled into thinking that because butter cake is such a common cake, it's easy to bake. I've failed just about every time I tried. Most of the time, the cake is too dense.
Well, it takes a person of courage to post evidence of her baking failures on her blog, and I'm not that kind of person, so I'll post the picture of the butter cake mixture before it was baked.
I can tell that I'm going to have a bit of difficulty in becoming a baking virtuoso simply because I can never follow anything that comes remotely close to a formula, and you'll agree with me that receipes are a complicated form of it. For one, I often improvise. And I improvise not because of creativity but due to necessity and irrational whim.
You can see that the paper lining the tin above is not the usual "tracing paper" but an A4 computer-printing paper because we ran out and I realised that only when I was going to pour the mix in.
The receipe called for 300g of butter and I put only 250g because I felt queasy just looking at the huge amount of greasy butter that goes into it, and also because 250g happens to be the weight of exactly 1 stick of butter.
The cake rose more than it should (and I'm quite bemused that normally the cakes I bake do not rise enough and this time round, when it's not supposed to rise, it peaked, and erupted.) The top was baked to a crisp and yet the inside was gooey. I had to scrape (or prise) off the top layer and put it back to bake. It was not a pleasant sight.
My sister tried the cake first and proclaimed it to be edible and believe me, coming from her, it's an act of unstinting kindness. But I dread having to eat it for breakfast for the next few days. And naturally, my mother reminded me, only after tasting the cake, that the amount of mix I made required 2 cake tins, not 1. So I'm quite sure now, blur people cannot be good bakers.
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