Baking Day

I haven't been baking for quite a very long while. So I thought I'd give myself a challenge and bake both a cake AND cookies in an afternoon. Also, I had to finish all that within 4 hours before my dad came back and find the whole kitchen in a mess.

The first thing I tried to do was bake a cake. As it is known, all my past cakes have sank in the middle or has been doomed one way or another. Actually, even today was doomed. The middle of the cake was still wet even after the 35 minutes instructed. I think it has to do with me making a tad mistake at the beginning and putting 100gm of cocoa powder and butter making it all dark that I couldn't see the texture when I had to add in the sugar. Adding on 20 minutes didn't help. After a 2nd 20 minutes and it was still wet, I decided to put another 30 minutes and give up if it was still wet inside as I had by then got all my cookies on the trays waiting to bake.

And time was running out! So I was super super happy when it turned out like this.

So excited that I finally made a whole cake that isn't collapsing, my hands were very shaky to take the picture. Needless to say the top bulging part was hard on the outer side from all that baking. But inside it was just right.

Beautifully dense, but a tad too sweet because I added an extra 100gm of sugar after I realized that the cocoa powder was really bitter.

Since it was such a success, and my dad doesn't like dark cakes, I sliced off the hardened top part for keeps and am bringing the bottom part to the office on Monday for a colleague's birthday so happen to be next week. It's seriously is a big relief for me to finally be able to produce a cake like this. I am grateful that some people continuously encourages me to bake even after so many failures.

So while all the waiting was going on, I made some cookies from a box of premix I had on hand. Besides the butter and egg instructed to add, I added a dash of vanilla and some red coloring just for the heck of it. I also finally got to make use of the cookie cutters San got me for my birthday.

Kawaii!

The cookies ballooned alot from their initial size.

And a batch of heart-shaped ones.

I finished just in time. As I was taking the mop out to mop the floor after washing utensils and wiping the counter, my dad drove into in. Haha! Talk about perfect timing.