hey there wtf-ers! how the heck are ya? it’s been a little bit, and i’m overdue with my latest issue, so let’s do this real quick, shall we?!
updates from the dang kitchen:
here are some things that i made recently that everybody ate: shallot pasta, pb noodle bowls, crispy tofu lettuce wraps, schnitzels & slaw. i am on a very alison roman heavy rotation lately :/
we’ve also been ordering a buttload of pizzas and cuban food lately, and enjoying our fair share of frozen meals - nuggets (always), meatballs and neatballs, sweet potato tots and other such delicacies.
cooking when it’s hot out isn’t anybody’s favourite, so we eat a lot of snack plates full of little bits from the fridge. i will write an issue all about the art of the snack plate (probably next) but if you’re not on the snack plate train, i invite you to get on board, choo choo (chew chew?) (i’m sorry).
now for the main event: birthday cake.
it was otis’ 5th birthday a few weeks ago and i kept my tradition of making him a boxed cake and i just wanted to say a few words about boxed cake.
i believe that boxed cake is the benchmark for birthday cake flavour and i will die on this hill. every homemade birthday cake is trying to get there, and none of them quite can. there’s something about that slight artificial vanilla taste, and the guaranteed perfect moistness that comes from a box of betty crocker or duncan hines cake, combined with the insane sugar hit from that tub o’ frosting - it just gets me right in the nostalgia. it gives me the same feeling as the no bake cheesecake i make every christmas - every component is from a package, it’s absolutely terrible for you and if you served it any other time it would be bad, but on that one special occasion it’s exactly perfect and almost gourmet-level delicious.
another great thing about boxed cake: it takes zero time and energy and very few dishes. there’s this very strange pressure we parents (*cough* moms *cough*) put on ourselves to make our kids’ birthday parties extra perfect. i’m not immune to this, but what i have learned is that the cake doesn’t need to be the most complicated or expensive part, which it often can be! boxed birthday cake, as we have already discussed, tastes better than homemade birthday cake, saves you time and energy (which on a kid’s birthday is already in short supply) AND also if you want to make the cake fancy, you totally can! you just skip a few steps. you can easily add some food colouring to the batter and the frosting, but you just don’t have to spend a single solitary second dirtying your teaspoons and measuring cups! what a treat. did your kid request a special theme or colour? mix your custom frosting right in the tub. heck, buy two tubs and go WILD.
this year otis asked for “an orange cake with orange frosting”, so i stepped it up a notch and added friggin’ orange extract to the betty crocker batter to enhance the flavour, cut the cake into the shape of a 5, decorated the cake with a beautiful french vanilla tub frosting (coloured orange), sprinkles, and canned mandarin slices. i also brushed the juice from the can of mandarins onto the cake as a soak to really ensure its moistness before frosting. because i am a very fancy and sophisticated pastry chef.
but do you know what i did not do? measure a single gram of flour or check a single recipe. i poured that box of cake straight into my dang bowl, added my oil and my eggs and my water and i baked that shit according to the directions on the box. and my kid blew out his candles and ate the frosting from one slice only and left a cake graveyard on his plate. i ate the rest of the cake over the course of the next few hours/days, and basked in the knowledge that the whole experience cost me probably like 12 dollars max.
so for your next birthday cake, i implore you: buy a box, make a sheet cake - one layer will do just fine - absolutely blast it with sprinkles, frosting, candles. do the most with less. enjoy the leftovers for breakfast the next day! there will always be leftovers and for some reason the cake tastes better the day after.
and that’s a fact.
love you,
kt.