Epic Birthday Cake FAIL
Over the weekend, my roommate held her birthday celebration at a local bar. Since it isn’t a birthday without a birthday cake, I loaded up my shopping cart with the essentials (eggs, butter, cake flour, vanilla extract) and set out to make a plain yellow cake with chocolate whipped cream frosting.
Having used Martha Stewart’s cake recipe before (see my post “Cake and Coffee for Breakfast,”) I wanted to try out a new recipe. One of the first things that comes up under a search for “birthday cake from scratch” is Smitten Kitchen’s recipe for “Best Birthday Cake.” I actually have been reading Deb’s blog a lot recently, as its layout is elegant and her food photography is beautiful. Most of her posts feature multiple shots of the cooking/baking process that are as beautiful as, if not prettier than the final photo. I’ll let you click the link and visit, but know that this is what the cake was supposed to look like:
The recipe calls for the batter to be divided between two 9 inch cake pans, which I thought I had. Turns out, I do not. They must have been lost in the move (I swear I had two when I lived at El Dorado). Since I did not have time to cook two separate cakes one after the other (which would have been the logical thing to do), I decided (wrong wrong wrong) to add all of the cake mix into one 9 inch spring form pan.
Let’s just say what about ten minutes into the baking time, the cake had risen above the top of the pan and spilled out onto the oven below. The delicious smell of sweet baked goods cooking quickly turned into a burnt smell, which still lingers in Eric’s apartment.
At this point I’m thinking that all is not lost. I quickly put a cookie sheet beneath the oozing cake and let it keep baking. Forty minutes later, the cake did not pass the tooth pick/chopstick test (surprise!) but the top had bubbled and was close to burning. Solution: cover the top with alumniunum foil and leave for additional twenty minutes until it did pass the chopstick test.
I took it out… let it cool… ran my knife around the rim of the spring form pan and…
Voila! Half the side of the cake fell off, still attached to the side of the pan. I sliced into it (to see if the middle was done) and found that indeed, it was “cooked” through the middle, but it was some of the densest cake I had ever seen.
So not only now did I have an ugly cake, but I had one that was hardly edible as well.
However I had made the frosting in advance, so I did frost the thing and load it back up into the springform pan. At this point, I wasn’t sure if I was taking it to the bar or not.
This makes it look slightly more edible, right? However, with the frosting making it hard to carry to the bar and the knowledge that it wasn’t going to be a good enough cake to make the hassle worth it, I opted to leave it at home.
The most embarrassing part of it all was that I had replied to the email letting everyone invited know that I was bringing a cake. Needless to say, when I got to the bar empty-handed, I had a lot of explaining to do. Good thing I brought my camera. :o)
I brought it to a small gathering of friends for a USA/Canada hockey viewing for reviews. We agreed it was more like pound cake… and just okay. I ended up dumping the rest of it and eating the frosting later that night.
At least you can’t really mess up fresh whipped cream.
