This year, I had a task: to make a birthday cake for myself and my friend K, as our birthdays are 4 days apart. The deal was that she’d make dinner, and I’d make the cake.

My birthday was Good Friday this year, and cake day actually ended up being Easter Monday, so I decided against anything with chocolate in – we’d all be chocolated-out. I looked through my favourite cake book, Sky High, and picked out a couple choices. After consulting with K, we decided on the Marbled Lemon-Blueberry cake.

The first step of the recipe is to make jam for the filling. I love that ‘make jam’ was the first step, it made my day. And then I made jam! It was also a good thing I had to blender-ize the blueberries, there’s been a rash of food tampering at supermarkets around here, pins and tacks and the like. People are scary. I made the jam on the Saturday, when cake day was Monday.

I find it is so helpful to divide up recipes like this into multiple days. Sunday was cake-baking day:

You use some of the jam to make some batter purple, and swirl that in to the cake pans.

Monday was the part I’m always least confident in: icing the cake. This recipe had you make a buttercream icing, which I’ve never done before, and I’m not exactly sure what sort of texture buttercream should even be. When time eventually came to eat the cake, I scraped all my icing off, because it just tasted (and felt) like eating butter. Everyone else seemed to like it though, and I generally scrape the icing off store bought cakes too.

As you can see, I had a bit of a structural integrity problem here. You’re suppose to trim off any domed bits from your cakes, so you have perfectly flat surfaces. If I’d done that, all the marbling would have been cut off! So, I decided to glue it together with jam and icing, which mostly worked. I found the icing ended up looking pretty sweaty in the end, even after being in the fridge. I feel like the lemon juice didn’t like mixing with the butter.

I’m not sure how the cake in the book has swirls so dark, and icing so white. My swirls were much paler, and I followed the instructions for how much jam to add to the batter. I also don’t know how you get white icing out of yellow butter, and eggs with yellow yolks.

Some cell phone photos of the cake at the party, after slicing off everyone’s pieces. Yes, I made a cake that is labeled ‘serves 16-20′ for a party of 8. It was delicious!