Every bite of food should be a sweet bite
Making this cake was a time for me to go back in time.
I was twenty-something years old, and it was the summer of 1990. It was my first trip to Europe and my first trip to Italy. I was going to finally meet my extended Italian family - Great aunts, uncles, cousins, my grandparent’s siblings both set of grandparents had over 10 brothers and sisters, so it was a very, long visiting trip.
It was an exciting time for my twenty-year old self.
This is the second cake from our bake-a-along of the Extraordinary Cake Book from Karen Krasne.
It took me the whole month to get this going. I did not realized how busy I been until I saw how I keep pushing this cake later and later, until I realized that memorial weekend was going to turn into a baking marathon in order to have it ready to post and discuss, along with the other bakers participating.
First off, the cake is easy, I think it may be one of the easier ones in the whole book, with 4 steps to make the components needed, they are all very simple and quick to make. The drawback is the waiting, and for this one you had to wait.
Friday was Tom's birthday. The original plan was to take the whole weekend off, pack up the car and drive down the Florida coast, looking for one of those adorable places that have a beach cottage right on the beach and stay there soaking up the rays, enjoying the water (before the oil gets here), eating lots of seafood and basically be lazy - The birthday boy told me he rather plan a simple BBQ at the house with friends and family.
So much for my power of persuasion.
When we started to plan the menu for the BBQ, I asked him what he wanted for his birthday cake. He jumped up and shouted "your coconut cake! Oh, wait, no how about the Zuppa Inglesa?... no, no, wait... maybe the Tres Leche cake."
The boy, was CONFUSE. Time to save him me some time, because when Marie posted the cake for the month of June and the Chocolate Covered Strawberry Cake fell on the Saturday of the BBQ, I did not waste time in telling him that THIS WAS HIS BIRTHDAY CAKE for him and his 20+ guest, period.
He knew by this time I was drowning in the details of this "simple" party, so he totally agreed and we went with it.