Second Blogiversiary with Ube Cake

Last year I pretty much missed the milestones. I hit 100 posts a little before the first year, which I completely ignored here because I didn't think about it and I was in Atlanta looking at art. This year though I decided to pace myself and have my 200th post when I hit my two year mark. Which was all fine an good except now I have a huge backlog of posts just waiting.

Anyway.

This post is my 200th post and my two year mark. I've had other blogs before and lost interest. So on a whim, I thought it would be fun to completely start fresh, but wasn't sure I wanted yet another blog. Two days later I just went for it. I went in my room, got on blogger, thought up a pseudonym, and here we are. And at first it was slow going. I cooked how I cooked, I loved new recipes but typically ones that had techniques and ingredients I was familiar with. Something new was a weekend "project". In the two years since I have made a conscious effort to expand and build on what I already knew. I can see a huge difference in my cooking and the way we eat, and HusbandMan even remarked on it the other day. New recipes are no longer projects, and dinner is always a surprise.

What isn't a surprise though it that a birthday calls for cake. And not just any cake, something special, something new.

This almost ended up as something French. I've been itching to make Julia Child's berry Bavarian creme in to a charlotte. But then one day in the store I found ube. Real, fresh, ube. Not powdered, not extract, not dried. Real ube. And that was an opportunity that could not be missed.

Unfortunately what I couldn't find was violet dye. The ube itself is really vibrant, even after being cooked, but it loses a lot of color when added to a cake.  Those pretty purple spots on the top? Yeah, that's all natural. No dye there either. Which is sad, I used the recipe from "Heart of Mary" and wanted to coat the outside of the cake with crumbs for the same look but decided I didn't want a grey cake. So I went with my favorite, plain sides, toasty edges and all.