malteser-ish cake

We had a great birthday party for Nick on Saturday. Five boys met us at the Science Museum, played in the exhibits for an hour (note to self: that could actually have been longer), and went to see the IMAX movie, Fighter Pilot: Operation Red Flag. This wouldn't have been my first choice. We had thought we might check out Superman Returns (also playing on IMAX) but at 2 hours, 34 minutes, that seemed like too much PG-13 violence for Nick, if not for his friends. But one of the big draws of the Science Museum is the opportunity to see an IMAX movie. So, they saw what amounted to a recruiting video for the Air Force--though as such, it did stress the difficulty and danger of the job, so it could have been worse. It was hard for me to get into the cool effects of the movie, though, as I kept thinking that any of these boys could be in the military in 9 years. That was scary.

But not, apparently, for them. And then we came home and had cake (see above) and presents, and they all went home without killing each other or fighting over the Legos, so all was well.

As for the cake, it was not really the Nigella chocolate malteser cake, as you can probably tell from the picture. (Here's what it's supposed to look like.) But, as I mentioned the other day, I couldn't find Horlick's (OK, I didn't look very hard) and I wasn't sure I really had any malt fans in the house anyway. So I substituted chocolate ovaltine for the small amount of Horlick's in the cake (and scanted the sugar, as Ovaltine is a lot sweeter than Horlick's), and I substituted unsweetened cocoa for the Horlick's in the frosting. So instead of a chocolate malt buttercream I had a plain chocolate one.

The kids seemed to like it fine. It's certainly not the best cake I've ever baked--the cake part was a bit dry and since it was neither malt-y nor particularly chocolate-y it didn't really thrill me--but it's gone now. So the whole thing still counts as a success. And it's a year before Nick has another birthday party.