Flower Cake

I made this cake yesterday. I think it's pretty cute. I got the idea to use almonds as flower petals off of Pinterest, which for all of its useless, oversimplified recipes, occasionally has good ideas. Paul picked the blueberries at a local U-Pick farm and we were really excited to use them for something yummy. The cake was a roasted blueberry cake, one of my favorite recipes to make. Roasting the berries makes them explode in the oven and then you dump all the juices into the cake batter, making it purple. I think I got a little overzealous with the blueberries, though. The recipe called for about a cup and a half and I put in a little over three cups. That would be fine if they were just whole blueberries, but since it was the roasted juice, it made the batter a little funny and the cake turned out very dense and strange. 

Another unfortunate thing was the frosting. Well, it's a positive and a negative. The good thing is instead of doing cheater seven minute frosting, literally just blending powdered sugar and butter together, I made a real Swiss meringue buttercream. It involved cooking egg whites over the stove, whipping things together, adding butter very slowly, and generally involved much more cookery and skill. I did it successfully! It didn't curdle; it didn't deflate. I made real life adult frosting. Unfortunately Paul and I forgot that we only had salted butter, not unsalted. The frosting, however beautiful and professional, tastes straight up like salty butter. There's no getting around it. We put it in the fridge over night, thinking it might taste better in the morning, but no. Well, Paul thinks it's alright. But me, I am sad. The cake is funny and the frosting is butter. Such is life. At least it looks nice.

The good news is that Paul made me a delicious dinner while I was freaking out about the cake. We had market fresh zucchini and radishes on top of wheatberries all mixed together with pesto made from scratch, from our rooftop garden basil. That was delicious and calmed any cake nerves. Another good thing about baking, however awful the result, is I get to use my beautiful KitchenAid mixer. She's a beaut. She's orange and sturdy, my two favorite things. Today I'm going in for a meeting about my college progress. I'm hoping to graduate a year early and I need to meet with my major's advisers to see what I need to take next year. It's a little strange being in college. You take all of these classes necessary for graduation, that you don't necessarily want to take and have little interest in. And then things that you are interested in, like farming and sustainability and community gardens and farmer's markets and zines and food carts, there's not much information on. Luckily the University of Oregon is trying to get a food program started and I hope to be involved with that in the future. Hopefully in the future I will be making yummier cakes, but we'll see about that.