Yesterday was was my sweetheart’s birthday and I decided to make him a cake. For all birthdays and other special occasions my future mother-in-law bakes a cake: a chocolate cake that deceivingly bears all the hallmarks of a normal homemade double layer cake. Paired with Eight O’Clock coffee and good company her cake makes for the perfect heavenly dessert. It is gloriously rich, moist and diabetes inducing.
I got an Ina Garten recipe that looked simple enough and headed to the store for ingredients. I wouldn’t say baking is my strong suit but I’m not a hopeless baker either. Yesterday’s endeavor proved I might be slightly more hopeless than I thought.
Here’s what happened.
I followed the recipe exactly or, so I thought before the kitchen filled with smoke and the bitter smell of burnt confection. Having recently moved into a new house, I don’t have all of my cooking equipment with me. I had to use the one use aluminum cake tins from the super market. I missed in the recipe where Ina specifies to use cake tins of the 2″ deep variety. Everyone makes mistakes and my mistake resulted in two smoking rings of chocolate mess at the bottom of the oven where the cake had overflowed.
“Shit”
Emergency mode ensued; doors were opened and I was on all fours with a rubber spatula(that’s all they had) scraping the dried, crispy, lava mess out of the oven to the floor. I figure the actual cakes are still OK and leave them in to finish baking. They didn’t look so bad when I took them out, a little lop-sided, not so bad. While I let them cool for 45 minutes, as suggested, I made the butter cream frosting. Tip- cream the sugar first and add the confectioners sugar really slowly: a few tbsp. at a time. I take the cake out of the first tin and half of it stays in the mold.
“Shit”
Keeping my wits about me I think ‘that’s OK Dai, just mold it back together’. I try to frost the layer but the cake is breaking apart and looking even worse. Taking the second layer out of its tin is sort of a disaster too and I am left with the saddest layer cake I’ve ever seen. I frost what I can and bring it to the birthday boy.
His exact quote?
“What happened?”
My response?
“So much.”
After laughing for a while, he provided me with the secret to his mom’s cake. She uses spring form pans and makes the cake the day before frosting it! So the cake may not have turned out how it was going to in my head but it did taste great. I will be trying this again.
I would suggest for next time:
Using the correct sized pan.
Waiting at least a few hours before frosting the cake.
Adding some almond extract to the butter cream frosting for a slightly different taste.