Vanilla Butter Cake

So today's cook was not Toasty, but Toasty's beautiful assistant, Mr. T. This explains why the second thing cooked in this blog about sequentially following a cook book was not in fact second recipe in the book (an appetiser). Instead, it was a cake.

To be precise it was a vanilla butter cake. These are cakes much beloved of Toasty, so sequential-se-schmential.

Basically the recipe just requires beating together an alarmingly large quantity of (expensive Irish) butter with baking powder, eggs, milk flour and sugar and then baking for 35 minutes, or so, at 350 farenheit. Sadly, neither Mr. T nor Toasty thought very clearly about the implications of baking powder in a cake recipe and overfilled their (low sided) pan. Cue disastrous, and very rapidly evolving mess of smoking overflowing cake mix in the oven. It was like a scene from "the Blob". Emergency measures were then adopted, involving a two man cleaning team, a gigantic fan and a disabled smoke alarm. Several cat break-out attempts had also to be foiled. Miraculously however, the batter was pretty much as it had been going into the oven (the disaster was THAT quick) so we were able to put it into two deeper pans and start again.

Even more miraculously the final result was more than satisfactory!

Cleaning the kitchen was a bitch, though....