Sur Une Nappe De Restaurant

Hooray!  My Jacques Dutronc CD arrived today, so I've been immersing myself in loveliness.  Speaking of loveliness...

Look at that beastie!  Even with the crapshack photoshop job that I've done on the background, doesn't it still look almost unholy in it's awesomeness!?  And your saliva glands are sending mad signals right now to your brain; 'Cake! Cake! Cake!' they say... and who would you be to deny them?

In all seriousness though, this cake was a nightmare.  Of course, as is always the way with this kind of thing, I had rashly promised baking for the next day, had failed to check how much butter I had in the house before said promise was made, and then used a recipe from a book which I had never had any success with in the past.  Oh yeah, and I'd come home in a really really bad mood that day, which in a wacky way, always seems to effect my baking.  Stupid, no?

So, having negotiated the mental (truly, 250 grams of butter in this cake, mother of pearl, but that's a lot of butter!) amount of butter in this puppy, and made my arm muscles hurt holding the beater thing up for a thousand years while the butter and sugar creamed (need to get a cake mixer, I know, but our kitchen is so tiny, where would I put it?), I managed to not cook it all the way through.  Which I'm not even sure how it happened, because I baked it in two separate pans because I knew I was going to go all layer cake on it's ass.  And our oven didn't flake out, so I'm not too sure what exactly is going on there... suffice to say that I made a very interesting combination of swearwords for it, and served it up anyway.  Hahahahaa.... evil, am I right?  It needed a little rescuing (the lad did that, because I was, by this stage gazing balefully into the middle distance on the sofa with my arms folded looking the very picture of fed-upped-ness), but it didn't detract, and it all got eaten, so that's the main thing.

So learn from my mistakes, children... when in a bad mood only used tried and true recipes that you could bake blindfolded with one arm behind your back.  And always, always check your butter/milk/chocolate chips/whatever else you perennially run out of.  'Cause the consequences ain't pretty.