Cake really isn't my thing. I like to bake and generally the things that come out of my oven are quite good and usually nice to look at to. But cake? I just never know what is going to happen in that category. The two birthday cakes I have made this summer prove this.
Lets start with Sarah's cake. It was chocolate cake with chocolate frosting. This should be a fairly straightforward cake. We didn't have a cake mix in the house so we made it from scratch. It all mixed up just fine until it came time to pour it into the pans. That was when we realized that the recipe made enough for 3 layers and I only have matching pans for two layers. This didn't have to be fatal but things just went downhill from here. We poured the batter into two round and one square pan. Then comes minor problem number two. The oven that we preheated didn't quite fit the three pans. Once again, there were choices to be made. Impatience and a time crunch led us to make a poor choice; we squeezed them in. The cakes came out lopsided and uneven. There really was no way to salvage them at this point. So we stacked them up, trimmed off the corners on the square layer and frosted it. We laughed the whole time we were putting it together because it was such a tragedy of a cake. Still, it held the candles long enough to sing to her and then we just cut it up and ate it anyway. Thankfully, cake doesn't have to look good to taste good.
Now we come to ugly cake number two. Lauren's cake. Here is the story on this one. We celebrated a day early because her dad and brother were taking a trip on her real birthday. This dropped our celebration onto a Sunday. I had spent a lot of time on Saturday helping the boys get ready for their backpacking trip and chasing down Lauren's present. I did not spend any time planning food or Lauren's birthday dinner. Sunday morning I searched through the nearly empty fridge and freezer and was pulling together a Sunday dinner. I decided to make hush puppies as a fun treat and had them mostly mixed up when I realized that my nearly empty refrigerator did not contain any eggs. I only needed one so I decided that I would ask someone at church if I could borrow one. On our way home from church we stopped by a friend's home and borrowed and egg. She gave me three, just in case.
After dinner was done, I thought it would be nice if we had a cake since we were trying to celebrate a birthday. No problem, we had two more eggs. Lauren said she would like a German chocolate cake with coconut pecan frosting. I pulled a recipe off the internet and got started. I failed to read the recipe carefully before I started. This recipe called for 4 eggs and I only had two. Okay, in this case I knew the cake was going to fail but I did it anyway. Since the cake was already half mixed up, I just finished the job with half the eggs. The cakes came out looking okay but they were very delicate.
I started on the frosting. Here was the surprise. The frosting also called for eggs. And I now had none. At this point I just laughed. Back to the internet. I knew that somewhere out there someone had created a vegan version of this icing. I found one that sounded good and got it cooked up. The biggest problem with this cake came when we went to assemble it. We had a very delicate cake and a very heavy icing. The cake just couldn't support the weight and like a poor foundation, it crumbled. Then we went and added that load of candles. Since when does one of my kids cakes create that amount of light?
Happy birthday girls and may there be prettier cakes in your futures!
1 comment:
Too, too funny!
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