We want cake! Give me some chocolate cake!

Aaron's birthday was on Wednesday. This was no ordinary one though, this was his 8th birthday! He had the privilege of being baptized that day as well, due to the timing of the move and grandparents being in town still. It was a great experience. Matthew gave a combined talk on baptism and the Holy Ghost. He asked Aaron questions throughout, as he answered each of them with assurity. Afterwards, Sharon said she was very impressed by him because she would have had to whisper the answers to Eliza.

After the baptism everyone came to the apartment and Matthew cooked hamburgers. Only the Blacks and the family attended, but we were prepared for as many as fifty people. We have a lot of hamburgers left :p Mike and Tran left as we pulled out the cake because Gen was getting fussy tired. Aaron chose a Pokemon theme this year, so I made a Master Ball. Simple enough - round cake with purple and white frosting. Unfortunately I ended up having to make his cake twice because my flour tasted too metallic from the #10 can. But it was so much better the second time. I added chocolate chips to the batter and tried the trick of coating them in flour so they don't sink. It worked, but since I forgot to put them in the batter until they were already in the pan, they just sat on top and didn't melt into the cake. I ended up getting the chips off the bottom cake so it would be flat enough to stack. Oops. I left them on the second cake and used it for the top layer. It worked.

I also decided to make the strawberry cream cheese frosting from scratch. I made a strawberry reduction and went the extra mile to sieve the seeds out so Mom could eat it. It was very time consuming but Aaron was happy to do that for me. I'd wanted to make the cream cheese frosting as well but bought one just in case which is good because I used it.

Overall I think it turned out well. It wasn't pretty or very creative, but all the stress and effort are worth it when I hear the words, "I love it!"

For future reference, these are the recipes I used:

The Best Chocolate Cake is a great reference for the 'why' of each ingredient
Chocolate Cake (ended up adding three eggs instead of 2 plus 1 yolk)
Strawberry Cream Cheese Frosting (I used probably two cups of strawberries, half frozen and half fresh. I still have a lot of the reduction left and have used it to flavor yogurt and other things.)

The strawberry cream cheese frosting was still kind of runny after using the sugar amount listed, so I added another cup or so. It hardened up well in the fridge though. Had I realized the implications of that, I would have added more to the middle layer but it was still ok. We ended up with three flavors. Purple was vanilla, white was cream cheese, and pink was strawberry cream cheese.