Sugar tooth 2# Orange mint cake

Happy october to me! Hello good month, hello hello fresh new start. It's psychologically affective for me to start thinking afresh at every beginning of new month. Set the month's goal, and reflect upon the passed month, if I managed to be good. See if I'd crossed some checklist.

To mark the beginning to another amazing month, and also (might be) welcoming autumn, we celebrated the first day of 10th in 2011 with QM MSOC potluck. A coincidence with Fakhri's twenty-second. 

Another thing to note is, clinical placement starts on Monday the 3rd. Goodbye London, goodbye comfy room. I had a whole stock of food in the cupboard that need to be either used or removed. I hate clutters, I hate to stumble upon greenish expired food later. Hence, I offered to bake a cake for Fakhri bubbly.

Using whatever was left, I decided on orange and mint. I planned to make it into layers of neon green and orange. I saw many cakes looking uberly delish on stumbleupon or tumblr, I wanna make one. And it's easy peesy lemony squeasy.

The plain butter cake

• 1c sugar
• 1/2c butter
• 2 eggs
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 3/4c milk
• 1.5c plain flour

Pre-heat oven at 165 deg. I mixed the ingredients following the basic cake-making steps. Sugar + butter, then eggs, milk then flour + baking powder. For the mint, i put 1tsp of peppermint flavouring and green colouring. Since I wanted it neon green, I put like 1/3 of the bottle. Still it was not the green that i wanted.

For the orange cake, I squeezed an orange and get some of the zest. I had to make two batches of the plain butter cake, one for orange one for mint, halved each batch and baked them in 4 different cake pans for about 35 mins. I keep rechecking cause I didnt want the cake to be too browned.

Cooled the cake in freezer for about 20 mins, in the mean time prepared the butter icing.

Butter icing

• 1 cup butter
• 5 cups icing sugar
• 6 tsp milk (this depends on how runny u want the icing to be)

Layered the cake, adequate butter frosting in between, on top and the side. I had some difficulties covering the cake that I had to freeze the cake a few times in attempt to keep the layers in place. It alost turned into Tower of Pisa cake in the begining.

To decorate, me and najah used instant decorating icing in a tube. The result was alright for an amateur. And glad that the birthday boy was surprised. The orange taste didnt really come out as strongly as i assume it would be. It will be best to use orang oil instead of squeezed juice. Prolly I need more zest.

PS: October, be good great!