Thrice as nice!

I missed my niece's first birthday coz of my darn exams... and it's not like I am going to do very well because I was good and studied... I didn't. But I just couldn't bake a cake because that was like admitting that I'm not going to study.. so I just sat and didn't bake a cake and didn't study... But you see I did not want to give myself the opportunity to say that I didn't study because I was baking! But then I scraped thru my exams somehow and I'm enjoying my holidays (:D) now and i felt it was time I put things right.

I was first planning to make a huge four-layer cake, two layers of vanilla cake and two layers of madeira. but then instead of making one huge cake that I wasn't sure what it would taste like, I changed my mind at the last moment and made two two-layer cakes hoping that at least one would taste good.

The reason behind this last-minute decision was that the vanilla cake was pretty flat. I had chosen recipe because How to Eat a Cupcake had paired her Vanilla Cupcakes with swiss meringue buttercream and I really wanted to make some swiss meringue buttercream (hehehe) -- because then I get a chance to use homemade white butter, yeah!

The recipe was a bit strange, calling for the dry ingredients and the butter to be mixed and then later incorporating the wet ones. the cake did rise, but it was dense. A lot denser than my madeira. At that time i panicked. looking back now I guess that the madeira batter gains a lot of volume during the creaming stage and also while adding the eggs. The only rise the vanilla cake got was in the oven.

Anyway at that time i was panicking, right? So I split the madeira in half, layered it with the buttercream and topped it with some milk chocolate ganache I had in the fridge (I always have some ganache in the fridge). What you see at the top is what it looked like.

Then I split the vanilla cake in half, layered it with buttercream and covered with the same and then spent sometime making it look horribly pinky and purply... well guess what, it tasted good.

And the cupcakes? I got them from the leftover madeira batter...  topped them with leftover buttercream and the leftover ganache...