Mufuckin Birthday Cake

Now that I'm trying to blog more and more, I'm slowly gaining more readers (like 1 or 2 LOL) and it's slightly nerve racking lololol. Also, my posts are so TL:DR, I should fix that. Or not, fuck ya'll.

Diamond Head
From "Extraordinary Cakes" by Karen Krasne

The writing is so fucking terrible...and I regret that smiley face lol!

After making Boobie's cake and then this one, Stefy and I have no appetite to make anymore cakes for the longest time. Don't get me wrong, I love making cakes, but we made two of them in such a short period of time. Our shit isn't simple either. These bad boys take 5 - 10 hours and we basically had to sell our jizz for a week to pay for all the ingredients lololol. Nuttin for macadamias; an honorable cause. In the end, I'm glad we made this one cuz it was so fucking delicious. So much better than Bo's dry ass cake :P

So this cake had some righteous layers to it with names I can't even pronounce and for this post I'll go through each one separately.

Bittersweet Chocolate Génoise
So the "cake" portion of this cake is a chocolate génoise. After consulting wiki, a génoise is basically a cake that doesn't use any chemical leavening (like baking soda and baking powder). After reading that, everything makes complete fucking sense because the finished cake was a little less than 2 inches in height lolol. I'm pretty sure I folded the batter properly but since I've never made this before so I either fucked up really hard or I did it really well lol. I'm going to assume I made it perfectly :)

Ingredients: unsalted butter, 8 eggs, sugar, flour, cocoa powder (I used Valrhona cocoa, my cooking mentor Mr. B told me that this brand is the shit so there you go)

One of the keys to making this génoise is to get the eggs to sabayon stage or ribbon stage. What that means is that you need to combine eggs with sugar and get the eggs to look really pale, double or triple in volume and have a "ribbon" like texture. What THAT means is the eggs will be thick and drip back leaving a trail before melting back into the eggs (looking up a video would help lol). To do this you need to warm the egg mixture over a bain marie, which is whisking the eggs in a bowl over a simmering saucepan. After 4 min or so, take it off after it is warm to the touch and put it into a mixer on high for like 7 to 10 minutes and the mixture should get thick and double in volume and the rest is pretty easy!

Rum Simple Syrup
Simple syrup is pretty easy to make. Combine water and sugar and let it dissolve and thicken up but don't cook too long or it becomes caramel. To make simple syrup rum flavoured, we just added some Cap Mo' Dark Rum. Done mufucka.

Semisweet Chocolate Ganache
Another word I'm not sure how to pronounce lol! Basically ganache is an icing that is made by heating heavy cream pouring it over chocolate to melt. We used pretty decent chocolate for this cake btw. I like buying good ingredients for my food and not that Baker's Chocolate shit you find at the grocery store #hatersgonnahate. Shtack was such a hater cuz the chocolate I bought was a huge portion of the total cost lol!

Vanilla bean custard
Custard is a really hard thing to make properly and very easy to fuck up...and we fucked it up LOL. I mean our custard still tasted fine but it was lumpy lol! That usually happens when the cream is too hot when you mix it with the egg mixture. My tip for that is to make sure that the cream is JUST about to boil but not yet boiling before you mix it with the egg mixture. Our cream was boiling HUGE when we mixed it with the eggs I think lol!

Macadamia Brittle
This is a pretty interesting and delicious part of the cake. To make this, you need to combine sugar and a little bit of water (like 2 tablespoons) and bring it to a boil. Then you mix in the nuts and once you cook this mixture long enough, the sugar starts to dissolve and coat the nuts. The key to this though is to not overcook the sugar... which I did :(

Final Notes
So that's basically the cake. Oh yeah! there was also a layer of whipped cream in the cake. To break the cake down it was:
Chocolate Génoise glazed with rum syrup, chocolate ganache, vanilla custard, macadamia brittle and ground macadamia and whipped cream and then repeated for one more layer...mmmmm

- I also burnt my thumb taking the génoise out of the oven lol! I was cooling my thumb in several cups of yogurt for like 2 hours... those girls better have liked that cake! I almost died! I think they liked it though lawl
- I bought this shitty ass $5 cake leveler from Michael's which is this tool with a wire that you use to divide a cake into even layers.... fucking sucked balls, waste of money lol
- I'm pretty bad with assembling cakes. I can never get the icing to be even across the whole thing so my cakes always sink a bit around the edges... I should fix that lolol
- Stefy and I had to reach new levels of homosexuality to decorate this cake since it was for a bunch of girls. We wanted to make it pretty so I decided to put some flowers on it. BOOM. Girly.
- Lastly! We wanted to write something on this cake but I didn't have time to make the icing so we bought this tube of icing and it made it look like a special ed kid wrote on it lol! it was so shitty to use lol I didn't want to ruin the cake with the writing but we flipped for it and the coin told us to write on it.

Fuck this storyline son

Well I wanted a short post and this one turned out to be longer than ever LOL!

Gorgeous Slow Cooked Pasta

Duuurrr. I'm forcing myself to keep writing. I think I may have like 1 or 2 fans out there which means I need to keep........ feeding them amazing blog posts :) I think there's a really shitty pun in that last sentence there. Maybe not. Please don't shoot the pianist, he's trying his best :D

Anyways, I've posted enough about drinks/desserts so I gotta prove my worth and post about some real fucking food. This one is a pretty sweet pasta.

Gorgeous Slow Cooked Pasta
From Cook with Jamie (although if you know anything about Jamie Oliver, you would know this is his recipe just by the name lol)

Why did I leave that fork there.... FUCK!

So a little background about this dish. First off, it serves 4 to 6 people and I ate this all by myself...meaning I ate this over a course of a week lol!! Fuck, it sucks not having anyone to cook for #foreveralone. Also! this dish is supposed to be made with a whole fucking duck. I love duck so much.... but it costs a million dollars for a whole duck, and its so expensive for pieces so I had to cheap out. I replaced the meat with beef and before anyone says shit about shit, I know it would've been wiser to replace it with another bird, but I felt like eating beef so fuck ya'll :D Duck would've made this dish SO much better though with the sweet and sour style #justsayin

Ingredients
Agro Dolce Sauce [the star of the recipe since there is no duck :( .....]
- Pancetta, red onion, carrots, celery, rosemary, cinnamon stick, garlic, plum tomatoes, red wine
Also, meat, parmesan, butter, orange zest and juice, red wine vinegar
And Rigatoni

Notes to Ingredients
The sauce is pretty sweet for this one, its like a new sweet and sour taste I'm not used to when it comes to pasta. Additionally, Mr. Oliver put down pinenuts and sultanas to put into the pasta. FYI sultanas is like white grapes (English snob I know lololol) I had white grapes but I opted not to put it in. It would've added to the sweet and sour taste, but adding that AND pinenuts made it seem like the dish was super busy with all these little bits and bites to eat so I took it out. I mean I had ground beef, little diced up celery, carrots, pancetta, pasta and then I'd also have these two. Meh.
Also, this is the first time I used Rigatoni pasta. Never had it before :D

Cooking
- This one is a longer cooking pasta, the sauce took hella long to reduce and simmer
- One little tip about cooking pasta (I can't remember if I've mentioned this) but when you cook pasta you should always set aside some of the cooking water. It helps when you are putting together the pasta with the sauce at the last minute and you need to "loosen" the sauce with a little water. The starchy water is a little bit more effective than just regular water
- I've always been slightly confused about the terms boiling and simmering. Seems obvious and maybe it is but there is a tiny difference and instead of trying to explain, here's a British guy to do it for me :D

That's about it for this one! I'm making another cake with Ducky this week. Hope it's awesome!