high-bar baking

Funfetti cakes are an entirely different matter from Funfetti cookies. The latter is a cloyingly sweet attempt to resurrect a childhood treat that’s best left to the vultures. The former is any perfectly good plain white cake with sprinkles added. Sprinkles are fun. If that makes me seven years old, so be it. 

Any post about sprinkles would be remiss, though, without mentioning the only thing sprinkles make me think of: the Progressive commercial (why must commercials occupy such space in my mind) where Flo tells a child, “Sprinkles are for winners.” That lives rent-free in my head. 

I even gave myself a mutation of it during boxing, in college. Partially out of machoism (hey, I was boxing for fun) and partly because the sensation of water sloshing around in one’s belly during exercise is unpleasant — “Water is for finishers.” Ok, to more accurately paint a picture, it was because if I paused the workout for even the moment it would take to get water, I didn’t trust myself to ever come back. Are you happy now? 

I was very happy with this cake (Sarah’s White Sprinkle Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting), probably moreso because I had been recently unhappy with Zoë’s white cake. That one had tasted like cardboard and doomed nuptials. This was a wonderful white cake, and one I will be using going forward. 

I was also an unflatteringly large amount of pleased by how accurately I’d guessed how much to dock the baking powder for the altitude. The recipe calls for 4 teaspoons, which I knew would have been a disaster. That much leavening over that long of a bake time was destined for a huge rise and a devastating drop. I went with 2.5 teaspoons, splitting the distance between 1/2 and 1/3 the called-for amount. Is there hard science behind that guess? Nope. Did it work? You bet your sprinkles it did.

I had to bake it long and hard for the inside to finish completely. You can see how browned the tops are. I’m glad I didn’t take any pictures of my attempts to carve that crusted layer off, because my leveling skills make your favourite classroom of kindergarteners look ready to take over a local contracting shop. All that to say, if it’s browning, that’s no excuse to pull a raw cake out of the oven. Deal with the consequences like a sane person, with a knife. What a sentence. 

Cream cheese frosting is a good move here, but not Sarah’s. I don’t know why she insists on adding corn syrup, but it lends an artificial edge to an otherwise lovely dessert. Use whatever cream cheese frosting brings you joy, or go a darker-end-of-the-spectrum chocolate route if you’re so inclined.