Featuring not one but two birthday cakes because that’s how your girl likes to roll. My sister popped into town over the weekend for a surprise visit, so naturally we had to bake something. That was cake #1, the Apple Rose Cake. On paper and in photos it looked great: pistachios, grated apples, olive oil, rose petals. In real life I thought it tasted kinda meh, but it was right up Cheryl’s cake alley.
Cake #2 was one of the best cakes I’ve eaten in a long time, for my tastes at least, and Gina was positively heroic for baking it because it involved “toasting sugar,” which, huh? Did they mean caramelizing sugar? No, sir, they did not. This cheffy little number involved putting sugar in a pan in the oven until it all turned uniformly light brown but didn’t melt. Right, ‘cause that’s how all our pans and ovens work—they evenly roast things without any hot spots. (Insert eye roll emoji here.) So, poor Gina wasted a half hour and mostly ended up with hot white sugar and lumps of caramel. Notwithstanding, the cake was FANTASTIC, light and fluffy in the way almond cakes almost never are. And the icing on the cake, literally, was that Gina had brought back some cacao from Ecuador when she was there last year, and she used that in Sally’s Favorite Buttercream recipe, which made the best chocolate frosting I’ve ever had. I would eat this cake every year for the rest of my life—so long as Gina made it!
The rest of the menu was much more straightforward and really good!
- Pear Five Ways (punch)
- Mussels steamed with curry and mint
- Pot-roasted lamb with rosemary and fingerlings
- Buttery Irish Cabbage
The Rookery 