Being Beata

I was crafty for this Mother’s Day!

For my mom, I made her a cake – Hong Kong style. In Hong Kong, cakes are not frosted with frosting, but with whipped cream. The cake itself is also a lighter chiffon cake. Needless to say, these kinds of cakes are hard to buy from an American bakery, so I made her one for mother’s day.

Show and tell (picture) time:

I baked the chiffon cake from this recipe. The cake turned out great, even though I wasn’t completely careful and made some boo-boos on the way. I baked it in a spring form pan for about an hour, then I removed the cake and put it in the freezer to cool.

Once cooled, I took it out and sliced it horizontally into 2 layers. Then I frosted the middle with whipped cream and layered slices of strawberry on top, then frosted it with another layer of whipped cream. See that gushy whipped cream goodness? I did that! Woot! I love whipped cream.

Then I frosted the top and the side (which was tricky, by the way), and put slices of strawberries on top and wrote on it. My icing hand writing sucks. Please ignore my 2nd grader letters.

The cake tasted great. My only gripe was that apparently it wasn’t completely cooked through. The middle was fine, since I tested it with a skewer, but the bottom wasn’t completely done (weird, since usually the middle is the culprit), but the skewer didn’t pick that up since it’s all the way in the bottom! At least it was just a little, so I just cut it off when we ate the cake.

Second mother’s day craftiness was more related to this blog – I dyed fiber! My mother-in-law has been wanting to spin yarn, so I decided to send her a little spindle kit. This is 4 oz of corriedale wool that I dyed with food coloring. The purple sucked up at difference paces into the wool, which created a pretty cool variegated effect.

Here is the spindle we sent her. Hubby made the spindle and painted the design on it. He came up with the sheep spinning its own wool idea – I love it! It’s the cutest thing ever!

Note: Design and Image (c) Sean Deitrick 2008

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 14:54 and is filed under Cooking, Knitting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.