The Boy Who Bakes' Red Velvet Cake


For every detractor of social media, you'll find a hundred people who love it. I'm definitely in the "Love It" camp. Sure it's taken me a while to find my spiritual home, but now I've taken up residence in the Twittersphere, I think I'm there to stay.

Elegantly sliced by my work colleagues
I dabble with Faceache; purely so I can spy on people I used to go to school with and feel smug that the bullies have had their comeuppance. I toyed with blogging - committing to the 366 Recipe Challenge on a daily basis for an entire year. Before that there was "Today, I shall mostly be cooking..." and now there is this blog - both of which seemed like a good idea at the outset but fall by the wayside whenever life happens.

But Twitter is home to the very hippest of my circle of friends and family and also home to my adopted Twitter family. I quite can't remember how my Twitter family came about but through a chain of Tweets, I was "adopted" by Paul, Kate, Maria and Dicky. Like any family we may not "get together" for ages but whenever we do it's either a riot of belly laughs or an outpouring of love and support that sometimes I don't even get from my real-world family.

Despite having never met in real-life, they all generously sponsored me running the Bath Half last year. And getting to the point of this post I recently received an ace parcel from Dicky. He had a spare copy of The Boy Who Bakes and asked if anyone wanted it. I offered to give it a good home and to pay the postage. A little while later, the book arrived accompanied by two packs of Percy Pig sweets for Miss A. Dicky wouldn't take any payment for the postage and didn't put a return address on the package so I couldn't send him any cake (Bunders, I would have if I could have ;-)) so I made a cake for the charity bake sale at work instead.

Ready for the oven
The cake of choice was a Red Velvet Cake. I had a disaster with the Hummingbird's red velvet cupcakes in my early baking days so relished the opportunity to try a different recipe. And as the sale was the day after Valentines Day, it gave me an excuse to buy lots of Love Heart sweets to send secret messages to my Valentine. Plus Miss A thought red cake was a suitable alternative to her current desire for everything to be pink and chocolate.

This time the bake was successful although my attempt to get ahead with the icing went awry. I made the sugar and butter part the day before and after a late night out at Book Club, I decided to hand beat in the cream cheese and ice the cake at gone midnight. The icing went lumpy - I probably should've beat the butter cream with the mixer again before adding the cream cheese - which detracted from the decoration but it still tasted good - and got rave reviews from my normal cake testers as well as adding to my growing army of admirers.

Thank you again Dicky. You've made lots of people very happy x


Slightly lumpy icing


I love post like this

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