Italian Cream Cake

My mom’s birthday was Friday.

Happy Birthday Mom!

And so a couple of weeks ago, I asked her what she wanted for dessert for her birthday. She really didn’t hesitate at all, but said… Italian Cream Cake. I had no idea what the hell an Italian Cream Cake was, but I was very excited because it had the word “cake” in the title.

Ever since I’ve started this blog I’ve wanted an excuse to bake a cake. But, you can’t really ship cakes and the idea of making a cake for just me… well, its kind of sad (but that alone wouldn’t have stopped me, trust me) and its also just too calorically tempting to have a whole cake sitting around begging to be consumed.

So, finally… a cake!!! I started off by googling Italian Cream Cake and then I realized that it’s basically a cake for those of us who love pecans, cream cheese, coconut, and moist cakes. Jackpot.

I did further research and found that Jennifer at Bake or Break had used the southern living recipe and hers looked awesome! So, I printed the recipe and read through it and don’t forget the icing recipe

It sounded really easy.

Now, let me preface this by saying, I’ve only made two cakes from scratch before. One was a coconut cake for Christmas (which was VERY difficult and required lots of strange ingredients, but very tasty) and the other was Martha Stewarts Red Velvet Cake (which, again, I remember being kind of hard to make, but yummy!!!!) for Thanksgiving one year. So, I kind of expected Cakes in general to be difficult to make.

This one was a breeze! Really… from the batter to the icing, it was really easy. And even though I couldn’t make this in my kitchen (still no fridge), I did get to use my housewarming gift from Steph & Justyn!!!!!! My new mixer!!!! See how pretty she is?? I named her Betty.

Betty is my 9 speed kitchen aid mixer (she also has matching bowls!!!!). And Betty kicks some major ass in the mixing department. I used her for both the batter and the icing. Awesome.

Okay, so back to the recipe. It is delicious. It’s not a super moist cake, it’s more of a dense, thick cake. Very mild flavor, but incredible. Normally, I hate cold cake, but I actually like this cake straight out of the fridge instead of after it’s been sitting around for awhile. This is definitely going to be made again. Yum.

By the way… I have a guest photographer for this entry, my brother Jason took the pics of the cake. He better watch out, or I’m going to be calling him over twice a week to take photos for me!