Bittersweet Buttercream

There comes a very sad point in life when it feels like all of your exciting times are over, and the rest of your years stretch out in front of you in a disappointingly straight line, as inspiring as an endless succession of shrink-wrapped microwavable vegetables. This point is called 27-- when birthdays stop being fun and start being morose reminders of how adult you are, how close to thirty, almost midway to retirement, dentures, and a vegetative state.

What is the appropriate way to celebrate the gradual sagging of young flesh? Crying oneself to sleep comes to mind. But if after that you still want to mark the passing of another year in which you did not become the next food network star, you should make a cake.

Since you are now, definitively, an adult, this should be a grown up cake. It should reflect the development of your tastes and skills, your flowering as fully realized foodie. The cake should be complex and take time and patience, because by now you have learned to delay gratification. And most of all, it should be classy-- because your days of birthday pork rinds are over.

But in the end, this cake will not be nearly as grown up and classy as you imagined it would be, because, of course, neither are you.

So I set out to make this classy cake, excited about another excuse to visit my happy place, NY cake and Baking Co. I settled on an espresso chiffon cake from Sky High, with a bittersweet chocolate buttercream.

 A chiffon cake is made with only egg whites, which make the cake layers light and airy (like me).

This recipe called for a hefty amount of brewed espresso in the batter, as well as basting the layers with a dark rum simple syrup, which made the cake both caffinated and tipsy (also like me).

I was very pleased with my cake layers... maybe a little too pleased, because I broke cake rule #1 and forgot to trim the tops and sides to make a perfectly even, flat base before frosting it.. The result was a slightly dome-shaped cake that shifted over time until it was completely a-symmetrical and off-kilter (again, like me). I told myself that these imperfections were a part of it's charm.

But things really started to go downhill fast when I started frosting. Now we all know that my piping skills are about as good as a 4 year old's with a magic marker. First I piped some technicolor rosettes that would have been more appropriate on the birthday cake of a mentally handicapped clown. I tried to distract from the rosettes by adding sprinkles, which are the opposite of classy. This was not starting off well.

As if things couldn't get worse, I made some pink icing and piped "Happy Birthday!", but within seconds, the runny letters had all bled into each other. I made new icing and tried again, and the letters were only slightly more readable. Lorenzo sat watching me, shaking his little head.

Frustrated and ashamed that in 27 years I had somehow not mastered letter piping, I consoled myself by licking the bowl of chocolate buttercream in front of an episode of Glee.

The next day I scraped off the lettering again, and started over. I made extra thick icing, and took my time on each letter. Wow, I'm actually pretty good at this, I thought, with a little more practice I could quit my day job. I stood back to admire my work:

 (stunned silence)

 I'm not really sure what to say here. If you ever read this blog, you should really not be surprised that I could have spent hours and hours planning and baking a concept cake, only to write Happy Birtday. In fact, this is kind of perfect; this cake epitomizes the farce that is my life.

I considered leaving the cake misspelled as a sort of baked tableau of failure, but in the end I fixed the lettering and the frosting. I think the final product came out fairly well, and belies the extreme lengths and multiple tries that went into making it. It is not as perfect as I had imagined it would be, but it's getting there. By the time I hit 30, my cake will totally have it's shit together.

Oh, and it tasted fantastic. Seriously--the best cake I have ever made. Happy Birtday to me.