With Pink On It

I made my own birthday cake.

It may sound odd, but it was my own choice. See, there was this cake recipe I have been wanting to try for a while. I did have to make dessert for a church supper, but this cake seemed less of a grown up gathering kind of cake and more of a... well, a birthday cake. So I grabbed my chance.

The thing is, I got this recipe off the back of a cake flour box. So it called for very specific ingredients. You know. They were sitting around saying "What can we put in this cake? Hey! We make rust flavored jelly beans! Let's use those instead of milk!"

OK, so it wasn't that strange. Even though I had to buy clear vanilla. And the cake itself tuned out very well. But the icing called for raspberry syrup. I have never in my life seen raspberry syrup, unless you count the concoctions I have been known to whip up with jam and regular pancake syrup. And I somehow don't think that's what it was asking for, because my name isn't Smucker's. I looked in every place I could think of at the grocery store, but I couldn't find it. So instead I decided I would use the Hershey's Strawberry syrup we had at home, the kind to make pink milk, which Nick insists he loves, even though he doesn't and never drinks it. I figured it couldn't be much different, right?

Well... who knows. But the picture of the cake on the box was a really nicely decorated pale pink cake. And I know that pictures lie, and I shouldn't believe the back of the box... And I definitely didn't expect to be able to decorate it the same way... but my cake... well... Barbie would have been proud.
You can't really get a good idea of the BRIGHTNESS of the pink from these photos. It's a lot darker and PINK in real life, kind of clashing with the raspberries on the top. But it turned out PK, I guess. Despite the cloying and overwhelming fake strawberry taste from the icing. I'm thinking about making this cake again, but using chocolate syrup in the icing!


By the way, my kids told me this was the best cake ever, and all day yesterday Nathan kept trying to climb on the counter "to look at the cake." Only I couldn't convince him that we don't look with our index fingers.