Sylvia's Scenario

This is sort of a random recipe that I wasn't planning to post but my family all loved it so much that I knew it was a keeper.  I got the recipe from  Sally's Baking Addiction  at the spur of the moment when my 4-year-old grandson decided at the last minute he wanted a banana cake for his birthday. The only difference between my recipe and the original recipe is that I made my cake into a layered cake instead of putting it in a 9” X 13" pan...you know, to get that traditional birthday cake look and to get that birthday cake look that's decorated by a 6-year-old and 4-year-old. I also made  Beatty's Chocolate Cake  for Lauren, the same cake I made to celebrate all five of the July birthdays last year.    This year, we all got individual celebrations and cakes.  How lucky is that?                                      You can safely say that we all got...

I've made a lot of different types of chocolate cakes before but now I think this recipe will be my go-to chocolate cake.  Yesterday, we celebrated birthdays for five people in my family. Yes, five . We have a lot of July birthdays but since the grandkids were in Japan during their own two birthdays, we had to celebrate now that they are back and I made this chocolate cake. After I decorated it, it looked like this: Our 5-year-old granddaughter requested chocolate cake so I picked Ina Garten's Beatty's Chocolate Cake.  It was a huge success.  We let her blow out the candles and she was so thrilled.  But she was more thrilled eating it and even commented how good it was.  I told her I'd make it every year for her birthday if she wanted.    Everyone loved this cake.  It was super moist and chocolately.  As with many of my recipes that involve chocolate cake, it uses coffee to bring out the chocolate flavor. The batter was more runny than most ...

 The grand finale of our July celebrations in our family was Lauren's birthday yesterday.  We celebrated  at our house out on the deck and had a very fun and  deliciously  good time. It's been non-stop around here since  Father's Day  when we had our first relatively large gathering at our house since the pandemic by inviting some friends over to celebrate with us. The rest of the celebrations have just been immediate family but it's been one-after-the other in July; Fourth of July, Nick's birthday, my birthday, our anniversary and now Lauren's birthday .  Last year, I made Lauren's favorite cake, the  Lemon Curd and White Chocolate Truffle Cake .  (The grandkids loved it!) I've made this a few times for Lauren's birthday, as well as for Easter, but this year I told Lauren I wanted to try a new recipe, an ice cream cake.  We've been having endless warm weather this summer so it was a perfect summer to try an ice cream cake so Tripl...