Italian Cream Cake

Happy Birthday, Mom!

It's my mom's birthday so I told her I would bake her anything she wanted. She chose an Italian Cream Cake from Cooking Light. While I've been wanting to try this for a long time, I've never actually made a layer cake by myself before. Please don't hold my shoddy frosting work against me or this cake for that matter because it is incredibly moist and lightly flavored with vanilla and touch of coconut. And those little specks you see in the cake, those are finely chopped toasted pecans. Oh this cake is so worth the extra work that went into making it.

When I say extra work, I really just mean the process of whipping egg whites then gently folding them into the batter. It's really not a big deal but this cake will take you longer to mix than to bake.

Cooking Light as their name explicitly implies, lightens the traditional Italian Cream Cake by a number of methods, one of which was to use Neufchatel (1/3 less fat cream cheese) to make the frosting. If I'm going to make Italian cream anything, I'm going to use mascarpone. That was my only change to the recipes since its my first time making it.

First time stacking and frosting a cake too. And man did it suck! I was so angry at the cake and the frosting that I was cursing up a storm while inexpertly spreading the frosting that was quickly becoming unspreadable! (Not a word). The F bomb was dropped a few times.

I only felt worse about my lack of cake decorating skills when I saw the cake dad ordered from his Italian baker friend...jerk. Look how perfect that damn cake is next to mine. I just want to smash the perfection out of it. 

Anyway: Happy Birthday, Mom!