Birthday Cake

Decadence is a term that communicates luxury and excess, richness and indulgence. So what better term to describe the ideal birthday cake. Credit for this one goes almost entirely to this post of Orangette, where a great many scrumptious things may be found. But, as usual, a twist was in order - in this case a little touch of lavender. The cake truly is sumptuous as well as scrumptious: It is light without being thin, and yet heavy without being a rock settling in your stomach. It's full of carroty goodness both in flavour and vitamins, and yet it could get anyone to eat vegetables. And it would be completely in its element in the exalted company of the Black Forest Gateaux, Flourless Chocolate Cakes, Strawberry-Caramel Cheesecakes, and Custard Cream Pies of cakey heaven. I very slightly changed two things about the recipe, in addition to the lavender twist. First, I baked the layers in pyrex pie-plates, since I'm increasingly uncomfortable with cheap non-stick-oleum cookware. Apparently the conversion is easy. If anything, lower the oven temperature 15-25 degrees, or shorten the baking time by about 10%. Just don't forget to grease and flour the baking dishes - I even used parchment paper in the bottom just in case, which turned out to be a good move since this cake is so moist it is a bit sticky until it cools a bit. The other thing I changed was the amount of lemon in the icing. As I was adding the lemon juice, it kept tasting better and better, so I probably ended up with about triple the recommended amount purely as a matter of taste. It did make the icing a little soft...The lavender twist was as follows: I took a little of the plain icing, before adding the lemon, and added a very few drops of lavender oil to it. Careful! Lavender oil is strong stuff and many people think it tastes like soap if it is at all overdone. The trick is to make the flavour the same as a passing whiff of a fresh lavender field - sweet, warm, herbal, and a little dusty - with none of the astringency that comes with the concentration of the oil. In short, lots of sugar to very little oil. Once flavoured, I colored the icing to lavender purple and then used it to write on the cake. It was a little soft for cake-writing, but it worked and it gave each piece just the slightest hint of lavender, which went really well with the lemon in the rest of the icing and the deep, slightly savoury sweetness of the cake. I'll not reproduce the recipe here, since the link above will suffice. If trying the lavender experiment, start with ONE drop in about 1/2-cup of icing, mix well and taste. Then increase in strength one drop at a time until you think it is good. Oh, and I also dusted the whole thing with powdered sugar when finished which helped retain the icing and also looked a bit like snow.