I Think A Cake Is In Order

People use cakes for pretty much every special occasion.  I mean, you have your typical birthday and wedding cakes.  There's also Christmas cake, Easter cake, Bar Mitzvah cake, Graduation cake, Retirement Cake, Halloween Cake, Baby Shower Cake, and Carrot cake.  Okay, maybe not everyone celebrates vegetables on a regular basis.

Basically, what I'm aiming to confer to you is that, if there is a special occasion, someone would have considered getting a cake for it.

You know what an awesome reason for cake is?  Successfully defending a thesis and earning the right to put 'Ph. D.' after your name on flipping everything as well as 'Dr.' before you name on everything.  So, when Ashly's defense came up, what better reason could there possibly be to make a cake?  Ashly's a hard-working, blindingly intelligent girl who deserves all the best and better.

One thing though, she doesn't like sweets.  Now, normally that would prove a little tricky because a lot of cakes are all about the sugar (which, when you think about it, is kind of ironic because Ashly's a carbohydrate chemist).  However, due to the advent of the internet, it is not an insurmountable challenge.  Yeah, Word of the Day calendar, ftw.

Enter the Vanilla Chiffon Cake (from Kirbie's Cravings), dressed up with a little Dream Whip and (duh) fresh strawberries.  I cut the cake in half, spread strawberry jam on both sides, spread the cream and layered strawberry slices in the center and then loaded the top up there.

Wrapping and transport (left) can be really tricky!  I can fully appreciate cake boxes now because, man, I would have killed for one to take this sucker into the office.  To the right, you can see the filling much better.  This cake taught me many things but, among them, I learned that strawberries don't like my mandolin!  T___T  That's okay, of course, because I also have a wicked paring knife.  The strawberries were no match for Big Blue!

I won’t lie to you on this one.  Making cake from scratch is hard stuff!  Its especially hard when you don’t have the right pan.  I ended up using a spring form and had problems like you wouldn’t believe.  If I had to make the choice in this situation, I’d make the same call again though I might make cupcakes instead.  For future successful defences, however, it will be cupcakes.  Cake can be tricky to dish out and safely transport between locations. 

I can definitely say that I have a whole new respect for cake bakers (professional or otherwise).  You guys must have the patience of Buddhist monks!

Notes!

(1) Okay, with the cake.  I pretty much, more or less, followed the recipe.  But (please, you knew that was coming!) I substituted the all-purpose flour for sifted cake flour in the hopes of giving this baby some extra rise.  Also, I used superfine sugar when doing the egg whites because it dissolves much better in the whites than the granulated sugar does.

(2) Dream Whip makes an awesome dressing for cakes!  As a side note for using it, in order to get an 'icing' on the thicker side, I used a little less than the 1/2 cup of milk they tell you to use and then just beat the living day lights out of it.  I used the leftovers from the cake to enjoy the rest of the strawberries! ^__^