Another birthday cake!

It was my dad's birthday last week, which meant that it was time for me to unleash my cake-making skills, which are seldom used now, except for on special occasions. I had planned to make a black forest cake, but because my dad doesn't like eating chocolate cake, I would have had to change it to a sponge cake, and probably just use the kirsch in the cream filling...all of which would render the cake anything but an authentic black forest cake. Anyway, my dad ended up buying strawberries, so I decided to make the good ol' strawberries and cream layered sponge cake. Here's the result!

I hadn't done any cake decorating in a while, so my chocolate writing looks a bit wonky. The cake would have also looked better if I had used green kiwifruit to decorate it; but at the time, there were only the sweeter golden variety in the fridge, so they were used.

Three-layered sponge cake

I made two 20cm sponge cakes and divided each into two layers, but only ended up using three of these, because the cake would otherwise be too tall. Pieces were torn from the spare cake layer by bare hands and dipped into the leftover chantilly cream, serving as a quick afternoon tea. It felt so primitive and wrong eating cake that way, but it didn't detract from its deliciousness of course.

Oh, and we had burritos for dinner! Yum!

In case you were wondering, yes we did use the same candles as last time (the damn Magic Relighting Candles that even sends out random electricity-like sparks - The Cheesecake Shop really needs to amp up their quality and safety tests), but learning our lesson from the last 2 times, the lighted candle was plucked out of the cake before it was blown out and then had its wick squashed (on the table - why?!) to fully extinguish the flame this time. It was all done so quickly that dad even forgot to make his birthday wish before doing all that - oops!

What's interesting is that although I'm sure I didn't do anything different than what I usually do, the whipped cream ended up being much smoother and lighter this time, such that I didn't even need to run the spatula over the top of the cake that many times to achieve an even, smooth surface. It even tasted lighter and fluffier. Same brand, same type of cream, same electric beaters, still me... Very interesting. I wonder if it's because I might have overbeat the cream previously? In any case, cake success! :)