BIRTHDAY CAKES FOR SARAH

It is time to pick up the mixer and turn on the heat in the oven.
It is time to start baking again otherwise this blog won't be a food blog too.
There is no better time to start than the weekend to bake for Sarah's birthday.
No doubt that we had already celebrated with a pre-dinner ourselves last week,  she still deserved a birthday cake.  And I did baked not one but two.

She had commented that I have not baked any carrot cake for a very long time and since I  got a bag of carrots from Tesco (only RM4.50- very cheap), decided to bake her a CHOCOLATE ORANGE CARROT CAKE.

I choose the recipe from the Flavours Magazine- August 2012.

Of course, I reduced the sugar to 250 gm and I think that just 1 teaspoon of baking soda will suffice instead of 2 as I found that the cake has a rather strong baking soda smell which overpower the flavour of the  orange zest otherwise the texture of the cake is soft and moist though.  

I made a Lemon Cream Cheese Frosting instead and added the caramelized almonds for the top. 

The second cake was CHOCOLATE TIRAMISU  CAKE- recipe from BBC GoodFood Magazine  September 2012.

Again I have reduced the sugar to 120 gm instead of 140 gm. The recipe says that I should be able to get 4 layers. However, I noticed that the sponge were not high so instead I decided to bake twice to get 4 even-splitting the cake into even layers is not my forte.

Some of Ingredients: white chocolate, dark chocolate, coffee syrup, Kahlua (recipe use Marsala which I don't have)  cream cheese frosting (250gm mascarpone and 250gm cream cheese used)

It's dark chocolate bought from Australia.

Do pardon the blurred photos, my hands were messy with the chocolate!

Brush cake with coffee syrup before spreading the cream cheese frosting and then sprinkle grated dark chocolate over.

Finally both grated white chocolate and dark chocolate goes over the top and sides.