For once something that isn’t about the house (for those that care the house is still standing). A few weeks ago I saw a photo of a cake with polka dots in it and decided I had to attempt one. Turns out the trickiest part of the whole experiment was locating a cake pop pan. I dragged both IT Guy and Mystery DIY Man all over town trying to find one. Six shops and some disappointment later, TradeMe saved the day and a cake pop pan arrived at work yesterday. Since I had already waited 2 weeks to give this cake a go no amount of man-flu could stop me – the decoration did suffer though.

The idea of the cake is that you colour some cake batter and just under bake it in the cake pop pans. Then pop the coloured balls into cake tins and cover with some plain colour batter. Then bake and ice. The experiment part of this cake is I wasn’t sure how long to cook the balls for so that they weren’t dry in the final cake. I also hadn’t worked out how to stop the balls floating up whilst the cake was cooking – I am wondering if they need to be made out of a denser mixture next time. When I make it again I think I will use less cake batter as well so the balls take up all the cake rather than just half of it. After slapping some lemon cream cheese icing (an IT Guy favourite) on the cake and sprinkling it so it looked like a toddler had sneezed on it, the experiment was over. Only tasting left. After multiple testings at work today it looks like the experiment was a success, perhaps some room for improvement next time?