To my enemy vanilla, one day I will prevail

Like many other people, I like to dabble in a few other areas. Cake decorating being one of them. I was honoured to be asked to make a birthday cake for our cousin's, daughters first birthday party this past weekend. There was some back and forth as to what shape of cake and all that good stuff and then I asked the dreaded question - What flavour would you like? Chocolate or Vanilla? Spitting out the words vanilla is the equivalent to nails on a chalk board for me. Don't get me wrong, I like vanilla cake and have no problem eating it as long as someone else has made it. The decision came back and a vanilla cake was the flavour of choice. CRAP!!

I frantically searched the world wide web for no fail vanilla cake receipes. Why, you ask?? You see vanilla cakes and I do NOT get along. I don't know if my expectations are too high when I hope for the cake to come out in a form other then rock hard. I don't know what it is - but I cannot make a vanilla cake to safe my life from scratch. I poked around Pinterest and found a receipe that had great comments and seemed simple enough. This has got to be the cake, I figured. So, just to be sure I did a trial run and made up the cake last Wednesday, while it was edible it was not something I would want to serve to people at birthday party!

Back to the drawing board. I posted on my FB wall asking for tried and true receipes and was given three by a friend of mine. Due to time constraints, I made one of the receipes Friday afternoon. It came from a cook book - it had to work! Right?!?! WRONG!!

My husband came home from work, looked at it, tapped it against the baking sheet a few times and said ya - this would work as biscotti! In other words, someone would have lost a few teeth trying to chomp into this thing!

Admitting defeat I sent a quick text to our cousin asking how she felt about chocolate cake instead. (I have a receipe that works out everytime!). After providing a bit of the vanilla cake history - I got a text saying, sure, go ahead!

So after all was said and done, here is the cake for a very special little one year old girl! It for sure got wayyyy better reviews then my arch enemy vanilla would have received!

Soooooo, if anyone does have a vanilla cake receipe they swear by I would love to have it! One day, vanilla will be mine!!! ;)