So the good news is that Ed is doing better now. He has two good sized open incisions on his butt now, with all the pus and stuff oozing out. (They were abscesses – you can't stitch up abscesses after lancing them or they will just become re-infected.) We've got him isolated in his own room with no dogs and he seems ok. We are taking him to our own vet today at 1530 to have them check over him and see if they want to give him a different antibiotic or if they want to do anything else with him.

Also – tomorrow is Ray's birthday. So, I tried to make him a birthday cake. I am again glad I never took Ray's last name when we got married because I really wouldn't want people to mistake the name as a statement of ability… This is the gorgeous cake I tried to make:

And this is what I managed to do:

It actually collapsed while I was trying to take pictures of it, I managed to catch some of it on a plate.

You might have noticed that there is a slight difference in how mine looks vs the one from Smitten Kitchen. This is, I think, because I didn't have parchment paper, and Ray insisted that the cake wouldn't stick to brand new Teflon coated pans… (His rebuttal for my statement that its all his fault was that he's a Cook not a Baker.) The result was that a chunk got ripped out of the middle layer. It would not, under any circumstances go back together in a happy fashion. Also - the Smitten Kitchen lady says to stick the cakes in the freezer for 30 minutes. DO THIS! It would have helped immensely, as well as ignoring Ray's insistence that the cakes were cool enough to frost when they obviously weren't. The top layer is perfect because it stayed in the freezer long enough to actually freeze while I was trying to fix the other two layers. But, regardless of the mess that is "the cake" – it tastes AMAZING!!! It is just… omigod. The cake recipe itself, without the frosting, is just godlike, moist and wonderful. Then, the peanut butter frosting is really good. The peanut butter chocolate drizzle stuff… Well – I think I would put more peanut butter into it. It really just tasted of the chocolate instead of a chocolate-peanut butter mixture. But – overall, it still tastes damned good. I am really happy with it. And in the future, I know what I could do to make it look better.

- Use parchment paper.

- Leave the cakes in the freezer for a FULL hour, at least in my pitiful UK freezer.

- So that the cakes are a bit thinner, I should use 8in pans instead of these 7.7 in Woolworth pans.

Other lessons learned:

- They don't have half and half readily available in the UK, so I used Elmlea Single Cream since its supposed to be lighter than regular single cream and you can supposedly use it in coffee. I think it may have been better if I'd mixed it with some milk so that it was closer to half and half, but it wasn't bad.

- PLAIN or BAKING or COOKING chocolate in the UK isn't what we Americans would think. In the UK, it's semisweet or bittersweet chocolate. In the US, it's, well, unsweetened, nothing but chocolate. So, if you need semisweet chocolate chips or chunks or whatever, you have to get plain chocolate. If you want unsweetened chocolate, you get drinking chocolate. I don't understand it, but that's how it is…

- As far as Dutch Processed cocoa… I understand that it is cocoa that has been treated with an alkali to reduce it's acidity, but there is nothing in UK stores that claims to be Dutch Processed. So I used Cadbury's Bournville Cocoa because that is what I could find. It works quite well, though I suspect that it may not be dutch processed because the cake is really fluffy.

- You expect since the English have moved away from imperial measurements, that it would be more difficult to find 8 in pans (which would be 20.3 cm). But why 19.8 cm? Who the hell needs pans to be 19.8? It made the layers a bit thicker than I wanted. (I think I am going to pickup silicon pans when I am back home in Oct.)

- The Smitten Kitchen lady mentioned using a commercial peanut butter so that you don't get the oil separation. Except that all the peanut butter here tastes terrible. The ones with no sugar added have palm oil added. And I can't explain why, but it's just not as good as Jif or even Skippy. So, we've found a NYC brand of peanut butter that is pretty good and I used this. I think the rougher texture of this peanut butter is better in this recipe than the Skippy smooth. (We can get Skippy here, but not Jif and not Smucker's Natural.) By the time it's mixed in, there isn't really any concern with it separating back out or anything. It works pretty well, even though it's a pain to mix up initially.

- I couldn't find corn syrup, so I used Golden Syrup. It really wasn't bad at all, but have JUST NOW found a better solution. I will try the melted sugar next time and see how that goes.

Wow! This has been a long post. Oh, well. I hope someone else tries this cake and has better luck making it pretty. It is really really tasty.