After part one of my birthday celebrations on Saturday, yesterday was the actual big day – the day I turned 29 and the last birthday of my twenties. Aside from the fact that I hadn’t booked the day off work AND the weather took a turn for the worse, I actually had a pretty nice day involving presents (yey!), a surprise bunch of flowers delivered to work, visiting family members and a homemade cake.
The cake in question was a Strawberry and White Chocolate Cream Cake that I’d had my eye on for a while in The Great British Bake Off – How to Bake book. It involves gently melting white chocolate over heat and then melting butter in the warm chocolate, whisking up the eggs and sugar into a moose and then folding in the flour. This all went well, but for some reason I’m still having issues with my oven and the baking… larger cakes bake much quicker around the edges than in the centre, resulting in slightly over-baked edges. Does anyone have any good tips for this??Anyway, once filled and topped with orange-soaked fresh strawberries, whipped cream and white chocolate shavings it actually became a perfectly acceptable and delicious birthday cake! The white chocolate makes a particularly tasty sponge – and even those over-baked edges were nice. Yum!
I also have to say I’m very grateful for all the lovely presents I received, which can be grouped into four main themes – baking, food, accessories and Disney! So all good there! Here’s just a few snaps of some of the nice things I received. Thanks everyone!
I’m looking forward to all of these things! Especially eating at Nutters!
English Rose from Manchester's Blog 
Hi Jen! Sorry for commenting on an old post (I’m just scrolling through old ones while sick and stuck to the couch!), but thought I would let you know that when cakes cook quickly on the outside and take longer on the inside, it is usually because the oven is slightly hotter than it needs to be. Everyone’s oven is different so maybe yours is hotter than most? Maybe try baking cakes at a slightly lower temperature than recommended and see what happens next time! Also, a good tip my Mam gave me for when things (cakes, lasagnes, anything in the oven really) are properly cooked on the outside but still soggy in the centre, is to cover the dish with tinfoil before returning it to the oven, it stops the outside from getting burnt!
Just found your blog through “Outside Beauty, Inside Health” and really enjoying reading your posts 🙂 I’m from Dublin so was happy to see you had visited recently! I would definitely recommend you stay for longer next time 🙂
Ah interesting – I had a suspicion it might be an issue with the oven temperature. Seems to take forever to bake things though.
Thanks for the comment!
Jen x