Eid and a Cake

It’s another Eid holiday here, Eid al-Adha also referred as “cow cutting eid”. This is the Eid where a family will sacrifice a cow, a goat or camel. They divide the meat amongst themselves, their relatives, friends and they give a portion of it to the poor people too. So, before the Eid day, you will see cows, goats being sold along the streets. And since it is Eid, the office gave a week long holiday plus the weekend, a total of 9 days, too bad I don’t have my visa and passport yet, so I wasn’t able to go out of the country and spend the holidays somewhere else.

Since it’s holiday, and even if I’m trying hard to diet and lose weight, I decided to give in to my craving of eating a “sans rival cake” which is not available here, by baking the cake myself. I searched the recipe from the net and read some reviews also from those who tried baking it themselves, and even Marketman find it's a torture to bake the cake. With the recipe at hand, the ingredients prepared, I braved myself in baking my first cake.


I boiled the syrup and at the same time melting the butter, which I should have not melted in the first place. Well, it's my first time to bake a cake so I thought the butter should be melted :-). I run out of the required amounts of chopped cashew nuts, so I just mixed it with almond nuts and another nuts, is that a walnut? And the egg yolks that should be beaten until creamy, well, I'm using only a hand mixer and it was a torture holding it for an hour just to make the eggs creamy. I got tired and the eggs are not that creamy, maybe because I melted the butter? Halfway at baking the meringue, I got scared that it will explode inside the electric oven since it just kept on rising and rising and rising. But after it was done baking, it stop rising and went back to its normal height.

And, because I don't have more than 1 Pyrex, I decided to bake all the mixture in one and just thought of slicing them when it's done baking. Only to find out that slicing this meringue is "sticky and a tough job".

So, instead of 4 layers, I was able to slice it only into three and its not perfect. I filled it with the "watery butter cream" and sprinkled it with lots of nuts and put it in the freeze, with lots of hope that this will turn out okay.



And the verdict: it is PERFECT! Just the right sweetness for me, not too sweet which will make you stop finishing a slice and not too bland that will make you guess what kind of a cake it is. The crunchiness is perfectly chewy, I love it! I just can't believe that my first attempt to bake a cake was almost perfect, almost because I didn't perfected the butter cream and the layers. But anyhoo, this is still one perfect cake for me and to share with special friends.