I am going to try and blog a bit more frequently rather than just use this as a placeholder for pregnancy and birth announcements! 😉 I had been reading through my archives and realised how wonderful it was that I had so many memories (and many cringeworthy) posts to look back on. I know blogging is passé now and that suits me just fine!

For Ev’s birthday this year we planned a birthday lunch for him that had to be cancelled at the last minute because I developed the most hideous case of hives and angioedema EVER. Well maybe not EVER but… I was a real mess! We had made this amazing cake that I had to share with you because seriously, it is delicious. Not too sweet, not too salty, not sickly… just perfect. It wasn’t a simple cake but it was so different.. just wow! The recipe is from America’s Test Kitchen book, The Perfect Cake and in all our years of cooking what I would think has been hundreds of their recipes we have only ever had ONE that was a fail. (It was their gnocchi and it would have definitely been our fault…!)

There were lots of things that made this recipe work but one of the most amazing things is I had to grind up pretzels and use them IN the cake mix itself. The frosting included a crazy amount of peanut butter but it wasn’t too much. It was just perfect… not sickly at all. The I also had to make candied peanuts for the top and Bill dutifully broke up the pretzels into tiny pieces for the decoration. It was definitely a team effort!

It was a three layer cake – I was really happy with how the layers turned out.

Here it is all decorated –

Here it is sliced up and ready for eating –

I am not a ‘cake person’. Bill could eat cake morning, noon and night but this cake was definitely an exception for me as I ate more than one slice and would happily make this again. A great and different recipe that was actually a real pleasure and lots of fun to make.