Chocolate Cake & Pistachio Citrus Pound Cake

I can't seem to stop Rihanna's "Birthday Cake" from ringing incessantly inside my head whenever I'm baking. "Cake x15....." Any normal person would be annoyed to death but luckily I'm a die-hard fan of Riri's!!

Baked a birthday cake for my hubby's turning 31 end of last month using Nigella Lawson's seemingly decadent Old Fashioned Chocolate Cake recipe. The cake was baked the day before, wrapped in cling film and refrigerated. If it weren't for a party I would have taken it out at 25 minutes while it was still moist. The dark chocolate icing was done on the day itself. However the icing didn't turn out as thick and smooth as I pleased. By the way, it was my first attempt at cake decoration.......... After sprinkling some red sugar hearts and hand-shakingly bad calligraphy, the cake looks passable as a happy birthday cake (i hope :P). The candles were re-used from past birthday celebrations (his & mine).. The "1" is a singing candle.......... 

Anyway the birthday boy looks pretty gleeful from the picture. Next to him is a pitcher of gin & tonic supply from his colleague........ I swear the Bombay Sapphire is the culprit that knocked me out that night! 

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Two weeks afterwards, I baked a pistachio citrus pound cake to bring back to Ipoh for my mom. Pound cake gets its name from the amount of ingredients used - one pound each of flour, butter, sugar and eggs. Screams FATTENING! But since I was gonna bring this back for my family to share, the fatssss are gonna be divided out~~~ hehe.

From the instructions it looked easy enough, but halfway into the baking time my cake mixture overflowed in the oven and made a horrible mess. I was so heartbroken I didn't even have the mood to Instagram the cake. And even after 1.5 hours inside the oven the part which overflowed didn't bake well although the other parts looked fine.

Sigh, every time I bake something will surely go wrong~  I blame it on my lack of technique and practice. I guess I need to re-try some of my recipes so that I can identify the part that went wrong. After googling what went wrong, I guess the overflowing happened due to over-beating of the eggs. The instructions also said to rotate the cake while baking halfway through, which I didn't do. Maybe I should try that next time and see what happens. Also, add 100g less sugar into the pound cake so that it's not too sweet.

Some tips while making pound cake:
http://shine.yahoo.com/shine-food/13-ways-ruin-pound-cake-221500870.html