Tomorrow is my sister´s birthday, but she is celebrating today with her friends.
After the usual what would you like for your birthday? the next question was what kind of cake would you like?
I asked both questions because I wanted to make sure that her day was special. She liked my choice of present and then she answered that she wanted a chocolate cake with manjar (sweetened condensed milked boiled for an hour) filling.
I told my mother and we agreed that we were going to make the cake, so I started looking for a cake recipe that we had done before (aka foolproof). On Wednesday, my mom remembered that she and one of her sisters had make a cake using brownie as a base for it, but what she did not have was enough time to help me with it, so I did it myself.
I used my brownie recipe and I placed in the oven, with an excellent result but the chocolate chips were kind of big (I learned something new: chocolate chips are alright when you use them for brownies or cookies, but for a cake, it´s much better to use a chocolate bar) and my mom gave me the idea to use the oven rack so that the cake could have three layers. I said ok, but that I was going to do it on the following day.
Thursday came and I woke up early, played on the computer and after a little while I decided I was going to get up and have breakfast so that I could make the cake with my mother, but I went into her room and she was gone. I had no other choice but to do it myself because it had to be done at least one day ahead.
My kitchen is very small, and at one moment I had the cake made the previous evening next to the stove and on top of cookie sheets, a food processor, a wooden cutting board, a knife and the melted chocolate...a complete but manageable chaos.
After making the double recipe, I noticed that I had to take the oven rack out and had nowhere to put it. I simply put all the items that I didn´t need any more on the sink, cleaned the counter and placed a tile to allow the brownie to cool down. The only good thing was that I had made the chocolate spread, which I had to move every other minute to give it a brilliant finish. But I still had to do the filling.
Before I knew it, I was on the move again: putting away all the things that I no longer needed, making space in the fridge to put the cake once it was done, take out the manjar and milk and an orange-flavored rum, and it was kind of wild because I had to take at least two or three turns with my hands before I could place anything or make room for something else.
And then I had to make the cake. I looked for a serving plate and I took the first one I saw (we´ve only been in this apartment for a couple of months so it´s a bit hard to know exactly where everything is). Now I really had to do some deepful thinking about where every thing was going to be so that I had no problems during the whole process.
I put one part of the brownie base and then with a spoon I put some milk because it would make the cake softer (handmade and not store-bought). Then I added the manjar filling and I continued until I reached layer four. Then I moved on to the chocolate spread, which I started to mix with a wooden spoon until it was ready to cover up the cake. At that moment, I just forgot that I had to take the food processor to cut the nuts and the chocolate chips and take out a wooden cutboard to make the chips smaller, and all the mess in the kitchen because now I only had to finish before I started with the cleaning up process.
After I placed the cake in the fridge I began to put the dirty items in the sink because I had to take all that had been washed previously and store them. My first victims were the stove racks, that not only required c leaning but also to clean the stove before I returned them to their original place. Then I moved on to the cooking implements -meaning all the ones that I wasn´t able to put in the dishwasher- and then to sweep the floor and to mop it afterwards.
Then I actually looked at the clock and it was about one p.m. so I decided to go take a shower in peace. All that is left to do is for my sister and her friends to try it this evening and then I´ll know if they like it.
It must have been good because half of the cake came back at two a.m.
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