Firm Birthday Cake: Perfect for Molds and Fondant Icing

This firm cake has many notable attributes: it retains its shape remarkably well, hence can not only be baked in a mould or mold, but multiple cakes also can be stacked and cut into any desired shape, as in the Hat Cake assembled for my daughter's 5th birthday. 

The firm birthday cake has two kinds of icing: buttercream and rolled fondant 

Furthermore, when you cut it, very few crumbs result, a most desirable characteristic when spreading your icing or frosting onto it. Best of all, thanks to the buttermilk, it is soft and moist. However, at heart it is butter cake, and hence the methodology needs to adhere to the creaming that is necessary for such cakes, and then alternating the dry and wet ingredients.

It is to this cake recipe, adapted from one by Nigella Lawson, that I also turned to make both my older son's 5th birthday cake. He was fascinated by maps at the time, and demanded that we take our community map out everywhere with us so he could trace its route. So when he wanted a treasure hunt, complete with a map, well, we just had to download a satellite photo of our nearby Hills Park from Google Maps, now didn’t we, and then use that as our base? 

With the firm birthday cake, even hills are possible

For those of you who are already bakers, some of my addendums may be tedious. However, what I discovered from teaching others how to bake, like my American next-door neighbour, was that the method in cookery books has been pared down to the basics and that they assume a tremendous amount of background knowledge. So hence I try to provide it. I also tell you what I have found works best, through trial and experimentation. Also, since they come from two very different traditions, the British and American, some translation is required, and not merely the obvious of grams to cups and °F to °C and so on.

For the Hat Cake, I doubled the usual recipe, and then baked two batches of 5 round 21cm (8") sandwich tins, making a total of ten cakes, which were then placed onto a 38cm (15") round stand, and once assembled, cut into the required shape. (You can bake as two batches of four cakes, I just thought flatter and more cakes would be good, and my oven fortunately took them all).  

Firm Butter Birthday Cake Recipe: Double (4 cakes)

500 g plain flour (4 cups)

3 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

½ teaspoon salt

400 ml buttermilk (1 ¾ cup)

3 teaspoons vanilla extract

250 g soft unsalted butter (just over ½ a pound)

400 g castor sugar (2 cups)

6 large eggs, at room temperature.

Pre-heat oven to 180°C, gas mark 4, 350°F or moderate oven.

Mix together the buttermilk and vanilla extract in one container. In the Middle East, we did not find buttermilk, but laban, which is more a sour milk but not quite the same – it's much thinner and does not work very well. As a more adequate substitute, you can mix up some plain yoghurt with milk - up to the 400ml mark - but having tried it in numerous combinations, from more yoghurt than milk proportionately to less, etc., I nonetheless find it worthwhile tracking down buttermilk at your local supermarket it gives a  superior result.

Mix together the flour, baking powder, bicarb and salt together in another container. Of course, you will have sifted the flour, which is particularly important if you use cup measurements since they assume for measurement purposes that sieved flour is used. Which is why I always weigh my baking ingredients instead. Baking is a science while cooking is an art, so it is imperative you get your measurements absolutely right for the best results. With a spoon, stir this mixture thoroughly. That way you should not get clumps of bicarb, for instance, causing mini-volcanoes when heated, or clumps of flour forming doughy, unpalatable masses. Which is another reason why, of course, you sieve the flour – I have an old hand-held sieve that is very useful, very old, it belonged to grandma, and which my children fight over using. Of course, with the modern electrical beaters this kind of clumping is less likely, but it’s a precautionary way of baking that I was taught by my grandma, Jess, when I was younger and now it is so much an entrenched habit it’s simply something I always do. Besides, it gives your kids or grandkids something to do that doesn’t need too much instruction or supervision while you get on with the real tasks at hand.

Follow the usual method of creaming butter and sugar. It is absolutely imperative to have the butter that is adequately softened and will hold a thumb print easily, i.e., is at 18 °C.  We need to ensure that air is adequately beaten into the butter, since it is these bubbles that will make the cake rise. My grandmother always told me that you knew the mixture was adequately creamed when it looked white, and couldn't get any whiter, and this also indicates the sugar is truly well distributed throughout the mixture. If you look for it, you’ll see it.

The butter and sugar are well creamed when whorls start appearing,

But the absolutely imperative thing is to have the butter at the perfect stage of softness - if you get this aspect of a butter cake correct, you are almost guaranteed perfection in your results. 

Beat in the eggs, one by one. Make sure each one is fully incorporated before adding the next. My grandmother always cracked her eggs into a separate bowl to ensure no egg-shells went into the cake; it also means you can hoik out any funny eggs (more essential in farm life). 

I have made my own bowl with a lip for cracking eggs into

It should look a bit like a mousse. Towards the end, on the last egg, it the mixture may curdle a little, if so, don’t worry about it. This is not a mixture that looks particularly appetising when you are done. 

Now, add the wet and dry ingredients, alternately. I usually start with the flour mixture, interspersing these additions with the buttermilk and vanilla mixture.

Pour the mixture into your tins. I always grease my tins with a bit of butter, even if they are supposedly non-stick, and in fact have taken to always lining with baking parchment, particularly for this cake. 

Lining the tins with parchment takes a little extra time, but is worth the effort

Yes, it does take a little extra time, but think of the time you will have to use up re-doing it if the result is not perfect. I don’t know, if you are going to worry about the extra bit of butter used here, then don’t make a cake. 

Be sure to leave a dent in the middle of each cake, it rises flat, promise!

The baking parchment means no crumbs result when you lift the cake off - a jolly useful attribute.

See - one flat cake, as promised

A friend we met in the Middle East, Doshi, cooked the most divine fish curry and when asked by his wife how long it should take, wrapped up in foil in the oven, he told her just to sniff the air and she would know when it was done. Pretty much the same philosophy applies to baking cakes and biscuits – the smell test, coupled with looking (that’s where oven lights are essential), should do it. While it is very important not to open the oven door on the cake at the start of the baking process, towards the end, like maybe at 25 minutes, you can peek in and test with a skewer around about when your cake should be done. My kids have run off with all my expensive skewers, I find a handy substitute in kebab sticks, or even a knife, and you know your cake is done when the skewer - inserted into the very middle of the cake - comes out clean as opposed to sticky. 

Since baking is a mixture of heat and weight, then variations, such as particularly cold milk versus room temperature milk, can make slight changes in the time taken. But probably your oven will make the biggest difference – some run a lot hotter than they indicate. If you are going to be truly scientific, then you should test your oven’s temperatures with a thermometer to calibrate your own temperature gauge for that oven. I currently have a gas oven - which I thoroughly despise - but at least continual peeking at the thermometer enable me to guage temperature correctly. 

My grandmother worked with a coal stove and thrust her hand into the oven to gauge when it was ready for baking, and won many prizes and even Best of Shows at the yearly Women’s Institute baking competitions at the Royal Show in Pietermaritzburg. I have always therefore been a bit debonair when it comes to baking times, using them as an indicator rather than adhering to them absolutely. But am hell on weighing and measuring.

What can I say but - happy baking. And hopefully even happier eating.