pitter-patter, a vanilla cake!

Rainy days are something of an anomaly in Southern California; so when they do come around, it’s kind of a big deal. Lazy students skip class, unaccustomed locals wear their flip-flops out (for want of proper rain shoes), and all across city borders, everybody and their mothers gripe and grumble about the rain somehow disrupting the sunny, mid-70’s equilibrium that characterizes the southwestern coast of America. 

In spite of my fervent love for Southern California and a belief I hold that God carved out our borders Himself and declared it a little chunk of paradise on earth, living abroad has taught me that occasional rainfall should be the least of our worries. How thankless are we to complain about the four times of the year that rain hits our territories while entire populations grapple with monsoons, hurricanes, and typhoons on the regular?

All arguments aside, the rain is coming down in delicate, measured intervals today; my heart is settling into a drowsy, contemplative state… and for some inexplicable reason a strong urge to bake a two-layer cake has descended upon me and overridden all notions of reason and logic.

So I did what I usually do when such overpowering urges beckon: I heeded its call.

After some searching, I decided on a recipe for a vanilla-matcha tea cake with vanilla-coconut icing, and if you must know, it was the coconut milk that won me over. For reasons beyond my understanding, I’m obsessed with coconut milk. 

I must’ve fibbed somewhere along my baking process because my cake layers came out looking nothing like the original. It could be a glitch in the recipe or the sheer reality that I’m completely impatient when it comes to measuring and sifting ingredients and cut some corners along the way. (I’m betting on the latter.) Seriously, how do I even get away with calling myself a baker?

Thankfully, the frosting saved the cake. It always does. 

I’m too frugal to stock matcha powder at home (does anyone have any idea how expensive that stuff is?!), so to give the cake a unique twist, I made a coconut-cream cheese-vanilla frosting instead. The cream cheese helped offset the sweetness of the coconut-vanilla cake, though it also made it that much denser. 

Let’s just say this cake needs to be consumed in tiny portions. And it made for a fun, rainy day experiment, but I probably won’t be baking it again.

*Note: I decided not to link to the original cake recipe since my version came out nothing like it and I just don’t think I’d do it justice. If you’re curious though, drop me a line and I’ll get back to you!