A birthday cake

I'm going to try baking a birthday cake with what I've learned from baking cookies. Good thing no one else will be eating it.

I'll start with the blender, which turned out just fine for my Christmas cookies. I don't think cakes are all that different from cookies in ingredients, except there's some baking powder.
 

We start with eggs.



Adding in the butter.

Sugar.

Flour.

And now it's time to blend. I had to try a couple times before I could get the blades to move, but finally it whipped into a nice creamy batter.





I threw in some vanilla for flavoring.

 Next I have to decide what kind of cake I want to make. I only had one kind of fresh fruit handy, so apple cake it is!

Into another blender.

Blended apples.

Now I had to mix the apples into this:

The problem with the blending was the apples kept staying on top and everything else kept staying below it.  I had to run the blender for awhile before that got fixed.

Before...

...and after.

Now, I saw a cake recipe saying parchment paper was good to stop sticking. But I didn't have any parchment paper, so I tried cooking spray.

Cooking spray on a baking dish.

Then it was time to stick it in the oven. I didn't want to take any chances here with raw eggs so I looked up an actual cake recipe, which said one hour, then reduce the temperature for another hour.

After the first hour it was looking like an actual cake. I was surprised.

And after the second hour it looked actually edible!

I made sure a fork came up clean to be even safer.

Now it's time to ice this thing. I know icing has powdered sugar and water and butter in it. In some proportion, which I don't know. I looked at a recipe and saw two cups of water to two cups of sugar. Let's dump something together and see what happens!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hmm. My first load of sugar just disappeared into the water. It doesn't look like icing at all. Maybe the second cup of sugar will fix it.

Uh oh. It's still dissolving.

I re-checked the recipe. Two TABLESPOONS of water to two cups of sugar. Oops. So much for the sugar. Let's add some butter.

Meanwhile, I realized the parchment paper probably would have been a good idea. I was able to get the cake out from the sides all right, but it got a little ripped getting it off from the bottom.

Now, I have too much water in my pan so I'm going to evaporate it and hope icing remains when the water's gone.

Whoa. It gets bubbly.

This isn't looking too good. Maybe I need to stir in some flour or something to absorb the water?

Ugh, now I have chunks of flour AND too much water. Maybe I just need more sugar.

AAAAGH! It dissolved again! Back to the evaporation plan.

Uh oh.

It's boiling over!!!!

Okay, screw this. Maybe icing is supposed to be wet and it dries later. I'll try brushing what I have onto my cake.

Hmm, my cake is shiny and glazed but it's glazed like a turkey, not like a doughnut. Maybe I need to color it so it looks like there's something on the cake. Into a mixing bowl...

And now for the food coloring. And leftover Christmas sprinkles.

More sprinkles!

I hit upon the idea of using corn syrup as a thickener.

Umm, okay, it looks sorta like icing now. Some kind of gel icing, but icing.

Too thin and I'm out of that bowl of "icing." Maybe I need more sugar in the rest.

Okay, it still looks like gel icing. Time to apply it to the rest of the cake.

Okay, it's not sticking to the sides but I have no idea what to do. I do remember one more thing about icing though, if you cut off a corner of a plastic bag you can use it to write. Let's make some black icing to write with and I'll do that.

I did black icing by mixing all the food coloring I had, not by adding chocolate.

Here we are, a bag of icing! It's messy and sticky and my camera is messy and sticky trying to take a picture of it. Time to write...

Okay, the writing went okay at least. I have something that looks like a shiny cake. The last step is to cut it.

It's tasty but the icing is REALLY REALLY SWEET and the rest of the cake is bland. Looking back that was a LOT of sugar I used.