friday, twenty-three july: the lovers
The whole morning routine was disrupted today by the Olympics opening ceremonies, and then there's this cake. There is a reason I prefer to make chocolate cake--I mean, a few reasons, the first being that I have a really straightforward chocolate cake recipe that is amazingly delicious, no one has ever had a complaint about that chocolate cake. But also it's not that hard! It's an easy cake recipe! But when my kid requests strawberry cake for his ninth birthday, and I have a good strawberry cake recipe, I mean, I'd feel like a jerk saying no.
So that's how I ended up microwaving frozen strawberries and then mashing their gooey pulpy bodies through a mesh strainer with a wooden spoon before boiling it all down into a syrupy mess. Which I then I had to whisk milk into. And then six (SIX!) egg whites. That's before we get to the part where I'm scooping tablespoons of flour out of a measured cup so that I can replace them with tablespoons of cornstarch, because our local grocery store no longer carries cake flour, and I don't keep cake flour around because who on earth has the time or energy for a recipe that can't be executed with all-purpose flour? (Me, apparently. Matt walked by as I was muttering at the cake-flour substitution and said something like "you know that they make cake mixes" and I was all "you know, I have basically a single parenting affectation and it's that I'm making a goddamn homemade cake for his birthday.")
They're in the oven right now. (That's a plural because there are two layers, we're fancy like that. THIS IS TOO MUCH CAKE. We're not even having grandparents over for a cake party this year. I also bought fresh strawberries to slice up between the layers.) The birthday isn't until tomorrow, but I'm making the cake layers today, because tomorrow is also my birthday and life is too short to spend part of your own birthday microwaving frozen strawberries and mashing them through a strainer. (There will be chocolate frosting. We'll make that tomorrow, because making cake frosting is basically like doing magic, plus you get to snack on it.)
Today's card is The Lovers, illustrated with Canada geese because apparently they mate for life? I'm drawing a statistically improbable number of major arcana cards lately.