Ben's birthday was already quite a few weeks ago, and I'm just now getting around to posting about the celebration. Yikes!
Anyway, despite taking a rather low-key approach I wanted to share a few quick photos.
First up, the cake: Olive Oil and Blood Orange w/ Pistachio Brittle Topping
I adapted a recipe from raspberryeggplant and was (mostly) pleased with the result.
I made mine in this shallow dish; Ben made it for me and it seemed fitting, and Roopa's recipe said to put it in a loaf pan but I wanted mine to be more dessert-like.
It's a pretty terrible picture, but I think it tasted great.
I also made a little bit of the batter into cupcakes. That way I could try out the cake and topping before I handed it over to Ben! It would have been pretty sad if I gave him a cake I hadn't tried and it tasted awful.
You can (kind of) see in picture of the cupcake how everything turned out this rather neat shade of green:
I think it was a success, despite the fact that the topping was really really hard. I didn't get the sense from the original recipe that it was supposed to be a brittle, but that's how mine turned up..so I tweaked the name and decided to pretend it was on purpose.
I think that Ben had to shatter it with a knife before cutting slices @ his office party, but (he said) that it tasted delicious..so that's all that matters (right?!).