Cake for Dinner

Have you ever had cake for dinner? I'm guessing most of you have, at one time or another. 

But that isn't actually cake. Did it fool you? It's cornbread. I used the mixer to whip a ton of air into a pat of butter, then spread it on the cornbread just like frosting a cake. Serve it on a paper plate and stick a fork in it and it looks just like a piece of cake. 

This cornbread was 1/3 of a cake-themed dinner that I made for Jonna's birthday. It was the most successful, appearance-wise, of the three dishes I attempted. Would the other two "cakes" have fooled you? Any guesses what they are?

The 'cake' on the dark blue plate is meatloaf and mashed potatoes. I used this recipe. It tasted great, but as you can see, it doesn't quite pass as cake. That is because I put it together while the meatloaf was straight out of the oven and mashed potatoes were really hot. There's a reason you cool cake completely before frosting it. If I'd let both components cool, I could have made a passable cake, but then we would have had to eat cold meatloaf and mashed potatoes. No thank you.

The 'cake' on the light blue plate is a parmesan spinach cake, 'frosted' with whipped ricotta. Rather than letting the spinach cool completely, I immediately covered it with ricotta. And, of course, the ricotta did not want to spread beautifully on a 400° spinach cake. Nor did I want to serve cold spinach cakes. Trade offs. 

I highly recommend having 'cake' for dinner sometime!