revolution

i baked a birthday cake today using nigella's recipe for her buttermilk birthday cake, and i'm just glad to have used up some more buttermilk. the cake turned out quite nice and fragrant. i also made a chocolate icing according to nigella's instructions and screwed it up. i learnt:

1. never to use castor sugar even if i run out of icing sugar
2. to not try to dissolve the sugar grains by reheating the whole bowl of icing
3. that once reheated, all the sugar in the icing will re-crystallise into big chunks

my icing became very grainy, so i'm just going to call it a burnt sugar chocolate icing. anyhow, i was going to put up photos of the icing process, but something went wrong with the memory card and now i can only get a photo of the finished product.