Happy Birthday Joshua!

Let me tell you a little story about the cake. I've been making the three layer chocolate fudge cake for Joshua's birthday every year since we had a student from Switzerland live with us for a year. She is the one who introduced the love of chocolate to my little guy. It's a recipe from a very old issue of Country Living magazine. Easy to make and always a success.

That is, until yesterday.



I had prepared the cake and and tucked the two lower layers into a cake keeper

(a little icing under the bottom layer so it wouldn't slide around and some between the bottom and next layer too) so it could be placed in the freezer for a couple of hours to better facilitate icing it later. (You don't get crumbs in your icing if it's frozen when you ice it.) Joshua said he would put it in the freezer for me and so off he went, arranging what was already in the freezer so it could sit flat.

When it was time to ice the cake he brought me the container and I opened it to find a frozen wasteland of chocolate cake! I asked him what happened and he said that it must have broken apart when he was putting it in the freezer and it tipped, or rather fell, over at some point. So much for my perfectly rendered chocolate cake. I iced it nonetheless and he said it looked like a garden. This cake doesn't need any special dressing or garnish. Nothing but a fork and a glass of milk. However it definitely needed something so I pulled out a few plastic flowers from some past grocery store cupcakes and voila! A chocolate garden cake. It may look like a disaster, but it still tastes great.

Happy Birthday Joshua!