Birthday Cake

My domestic skills can best be described as average.

On a scale ranging from Take-Out to Martha Stewart, I fall somewhere between Amy Sedaris and Jaime Oliver.  You will get a flavorful and healthy dinner at my house, made mostly without cans, boxes, or packets, but the flatware is vintage, mis-matched Target.  The toilets will likely be clean, but there is probably dust on the shelves.
My poor husband has one of those birthdays that gets washed out by Christmas.  It is on December 27th.  Last year, on his birthday, I had strep throat and had to work.  So he made his own dinner, and I tried to stay awake with him while he ate.  Compared to that, this year was a significant improvement.  I baked him a cake without any mixes or boxes involved.  Old-fashioned, with flour and sugar and eggs and frosting that involved melting chocolate in a double-boiler (which I definitely don't have...who has those things anyway?).

Anyway, it went pretty well, but really I need a re-do. I'm not much of a baker.  I find flour fickle and hard to predict.  The cake came out a little dry, and I would say it needs a higher frosting-to-cake ratio.  Plus there was a situation while I was removing the layers from the cake pans, with fallout that I attempted to mask using frosting.  While I was making the cake, I thought about my nanny post, from last summer.  I thought about how people used to cook like this all the time, and how then mixes came out in boxes, and how now they can be nearly foolproof.  I'm almost thirty-five, and this is the first time I have ever made a cake with more than one layer and that didn't start in a plastic bag inside a box.

Anyway, baking is hard, and I'm not that great at it.  Next time I should leave the experts in charge, and just pick up a cheesecake from the chocolate shop from around the corner.