Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Baking FAIL

I absolutely love to bake despite the fact that it's bad for my waistline, well more like my hips and butt.  Last weekend I was bored so I decided to bake a cake to entertain me.  I was just planing on making a yellow cake with buttercream icing but then Gus mentioned he'd like me to try make Irish Cream Mousse filling.  After some more talking we decided that filling would go better with a chocolate cake than yellow.  I decided on the chocolate cake recipe on the back of the Hershey's cocoa container.  I then searched for a irish cream mousse recipe.  For icing I made a version of a chocolate cream cheese icing I had tried before. 

I've had quite a few baking fails in the past but most are because I try to be all fancy and use the convection option on our ovens.  My experience though is that convection tends to dry out cakes and cupcakes.  This time I used the regular bake setting to avoid that.  Everything seemed to be going just fine. 

I took the cakes out of the oven and let them cool for about 10 minutes in the pans.  I then went to flip them out onto my cooling rack when the first cake completely broke in half!  It caught my fingers on the pan and just broke.  I had already made the mousse filling though and figured I just press on somehow.  I didn't think the broken cake would be strong enough to be the bottom layer so I put it on the top and tried to smush it together with some icing in the middle.  As you can imagine, this didn't work!!  I put the crumb coat of icing on but it was obvious my cake was going to have a big valley in the middle.  I admit, I kinda gave up after that.  I just left the remaining icing in the KA mixer bowl and stuck it all in the fridge.  Good thing this was just for Gus and I. 

Gus doesn't really care about appearances though so we've been eating the cake and just piling on extra icing from my mixer bowl.  

Here's my poor, pitiful  (yet, half eaten) cake


I forgot to mention that a big piece of the broke cake fell off when I went to stack it. . . . I just filled that part in with extra icing.  OOPS!


At least it still tastes good!! 

1 comment:

  1. Oh Brother! I hate it when that happens. Take it from me, I've been baking since I was a kid. Your best friend in the kitchen is Parchment Paper. It's worth its pricey cost over wax paper or just greasing the pans.
    I NEVER bake a cake that doesn't have a parchment lined bottom, and buttered and floured sides. It's just not worth the risk. Your cake still looks like it was yummy!

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