cake²

[davidn]

Whitney anbd I hoseted bineer she's kissing me i can't type aaaarhg hosted dinner last night for e_to_the_ipi, allly_cs and quadralien. It's testament to how much the popularity of LJ has increased when you can refer to an entire dinner party by their usernames. It's also an indicator of the usefulness of the Internet when most of the recipes used in the meal were found as a result of searching on Google.

The centrepiece was a roast chicken, cooked expertly by Whitney despite being a vegetarian. (Her dad owns the biggest barbecue in the world and he's even more vegetarian, I don't understand it.) Despite watching a video on how to carve a chicken beforehand - "Slice here, here, here and here. Done." - that was the most problematic part, and it took a large amount of sawing and chiselling to get the bird apart at all.

Squared cake! (I've never been quite so excited about a cake before.)

However, the part of dinner that I was responsible for was the cake - Squared Cake, in fact. It was a theory that I'd wanted to try out for ages, but never got around to actually doing because I'm usually defaulted into making sticky toffee pudding when foreigners or other people with hearts that are too healthy are around.

To manufacture squared cake, you use two different coloured round sponge cakes (chocolate and plain being the most obvious choices, but others work as well), cut out concentric circles from each of them and swap alternate layers over - we used a bowl and a mug for this one, so that the width of the circles was roughly equal to the height of the cake. These are then stacked on top of each other and coated in a positively toothbusting amount of sugary icing (enough to glue each layer and track together as well as disguise the fact that it's been doctored in such a way from the outside). You can see evidence of trying to liven up the top by dragging a skewer across different coloured icing, but we didn't have any skewers so I had to use a fork and it looked a bit silly.

The thing about this kind of cake is that you don't know what it actually looks like until you cut in to it. Fortunately the squares had stayed together reasonably well, but I think a little more icing between the circles would have made it a bit more cohesive. Nevertheless it looked impressive, and I've therefore added that to the list of things that I'm allowed to make in the kitchen without the fire brigade on standby.

Additionally you have to admit it's pretty fantastic geometrically. I could go in to the Mathematics department with it, declare "I've squared the circle" and watch their heads explode.

Comments

[madtom.livejournal.com]

Is this your own idea? Because it's pretty neat.

[davidn]

I got it from an episode of How-2 about a decade ago. But thanks.

[diarytypething.livejournal.com]

And this proves how much of an influence How-2 has on us even now. My flatmates and I were reminiscing about it the other day and realised that we could remember actual things that they'd explained, even though none of us have seen an episode in over 10 years. I'm going to have to try this though, it looks cool.

[raphx.livejournal.com]

I remember How-2! Actually, the only thing I really remember was when they were showing us fancy tulips - there was one that had a stripe on in, which was clearly painted on.

[stubbleupdate.livejournal.com]

that was actually what i was going to say. Carol did it, didn't she?

[davidn]

That's absolutely right - I'm surprised that anyone else remembers!