Piggy's Polka-Dot Cake - A Cake All For Me!

My oldest son (I think from now on I'll refer to him as T, to make things easier on myself), treated us to Piggy's Polka-Dot Cake with Piggy's Choc-O-Lot Frosting. Both were made following the recipes at the back of Karen Magnuson Beil's A Cake All For Me!

The book, a math book about measurements, is far too easy for T's 12 years, but he was extremely interested to find out how a cake with chopped apple, grated orange peel, and chocolate chips would taste.

We rearranged the mixing order, so as to only dirty one mixing bowl. The recipe follows the rhyming text of the story, which has Piggy creaming butter, beating eggs, and sifting dry ingredients in separate bowls - a little more of a mess than I wanted T to make.

We were pretty pleased with the cake, but the frosting was another matter. It turned out thick, fudgy, and extremely sweet. And, there wasn't quite enough of it to comfortably frost the 9''x13'' cake. Not to mention the fact, that it called for using a double boiler, which I thought was kind of complicated for a children's book recipe.

The story ends with a group of Piggy's friends arriving just in time to help him eat the cake. At first Piggy protests, but then divides the cake to share with everyone. In keeping with the math theme of the book, T divided his cake, first in half, then in fourths, eighths, and finally sixteenths.

As Piggy says, "A cake all for me would be easy to slice. But a cake shared with friends tastes mighty nice."

It's great to be a homeschooler.