What is this Great Cake you ask. How can there be Part I of a cake? Is Part II just icing? No, that would be lame people. (Though of course there will be an icing part eventually). The Great Cake is a cake I've been planning for a while now. It is the cake for my last English class. You know, the class I talk about all the time? The one where I get to read and write children's books? It's going to end. This is amongst the most distressing things in my life right now, the fact that this class is going to end. And you may think that is silly but it is not just me- you should have seen the faces of everyone in my class when my professor that we wouldn't have a writing assignment due this week because it was the last class. We looked like someone had died. Puppy dog faces all around.
So, we are having a party on the last day of class. People are bringing food (like crazy sounding kinds of pretzel which I am quite excited about), and I am bringing the Great Cake. So what is the Great Cake going to be? It is going to be three layers: Butterscotch, Banana, and Chocolate. The icing, well I have yet to decide that. Suffice to say it will be delicious. And today, we are starting at the beginning: Butterscotch. Why are we starting with butterscotch? Because I always knew what recipe I was going to be using for the butterscotch cake layer, and I wanted to make it NOW.
This recipe and I go far back. For one thing, it is a Nigella recipe. Have I talked about Nigella Lawson yet? Domestic Goddess extraordinaire from Britain? She is probably one of the main reasons I started baking so much. I got completely obsessed with her book, How to be a Domestic Goddess, I think freshman or sophomore year of high school. Whenever I thought of making anything, it came out of that book. Cakes for every family member's birthday, desserts for every dinner party, Nigella was always my first go-to person. So, Sophomore year, when I had to decide what cakes to make for my grand birthday sleepover (of course I had a grand birthday sleepover, do you doubt it? Me and SZ, HJY, KK, GR, LL, and PL - I love that I have already mentioned most of these people and I have had them around for so long, it gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside) they came out of Domestic Goddess. They were a chocolate mousse cake, snickerdoodles (which aren't a cake, but it was important to have a non-cake dessert as well - to me), and the Butterscotch Layer Cake.
