Cake or death
Gir and I made a cake.









It is tea chiffon cake, made using cardamom tea leaves from Mauritius.

What is that buttery stuff on the cake, you may ask? It is butter. Gir thought it would be nice to have whipped cream on top so I whipped some double cream, but ... I whipped it for too long. :( We weren't sure it was butter until we put it on the cake, and then we stood back and looked at it and it was hard not to come to the conclusion that it is, basically, butter.

Gir: It's like butter icing! Just. With less icing sugar.
Me: Butter icing without icing sugar is just BUTTER.

The third picture would be excellent food porn if it wasn't obvious that we failed to mix in the egg whites properly. Koff. Still and all, the cake itself was really super tasty. It collapsed in on itself when we took it out -- how do you prevent this? Every chiffon cake I have ever made does it -- but it was still pretty light. And the cardamom tea was just perfect for making the cake -- strong enough to come through, perfumed and sweet.

We were trying to brainstorm other kinds of tea you could use that would be nice. Gir said normal English Breakfast was not strong enough. Chai is OK, but she said not as nice as the cardamom tea we used today. Googling "tea chiffon cake" brings up green tea cakes, which should taste right because green tea is quite strong, but I'm not that keen on green tea-flavoured things. And Gir was unimpressed by my suggestion of lapsang souchong.

What do you think?

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