Day One Hundred Eighty Three: Happy Half-iversary!

It's hard to believe that this blog is SIX months old today.  I'm half finished with my crazy commitment to try one Martha task a day, and you are half finished reading about it.  Well done, you.  I'm a little astonished that I've been doing this for six weeks.  Fact of Life:  Time flies when you are busy as hell having fun.  To mark the occasion, I made Martha's Birthday Cake.  This cake was conceived and baked for Martha's birthday and it's a beauty:

My kids have been bugging me to make this cake for months now.  They spotted it in one of Martha's baking books and it's become a bit of an obsession.  It's actually a dome-shaped cake with a layer of buttercream filling, a layer of apricot filling and a meringue topping.   I'll give you a moment to savor the visual.

This is my dome-shaped cake.  It's a standard cake baked with cake flour, but mixed with eight whipped egg whites, so it's super-light.  It's like cake-flavored mousse.

Martha cuts the cake into four layers, but given my past problems with cake leveling, I thought three levels would be challenge enough.   According to Martha, an easy way to cut cake layers is to insert toothpicks into the cake, and use them as a guide for your serrated knife.  Like so:

This was a nifty trick and totally worked.  I felt like a layer-cutting rock star. :air guitar:  This is two layers with a layer of meringue buttercream in between:

The second layer is topped with a layer of apricot filling:

 And finally the dome top:

Did I mention every layer is brushed with Amaretto simple syrup?  It's delicious.  :sigh:

The finished layers are topped with a thin layer of meringue buttercream icing:

All these egg whites and meringue mean that there were lots of egg yolks left.  This is my glass of leftover egg yolks:

Pretty gross, actually.

After that, I piped meringue stars all over the cake...one by one....

About a year half-hour later, my cake was complete:

My cake doesn't look quite as perky as Martha's cake.  I'm not sure why, and I don't care.  It's still amazing, and amazingly good.

Happy Half-iversary!