I’m kind of freaking out right now. I wanted to write a post about baking but I cannot for the life of me locate a picture of the coolest cake I ever made. I mean it wasn’t like the Taj Mahal of cakes or anything but it was pretty darn cool, and it looks like not a single person at my sister’s engagement party took a picture of it. This makes me really upset. Like really upset. Don’t you hate that, when some stupid little thing acts as the cornerstone for a whole day of mucky feeling?
Well, fine. I can’t show you that cake. And I wasn’t going to start that way anyway. I was going to tell you how baking’s been a long road of trial and error for me and how this one time I tried making a box brownie recipe but I thought it called for 4 cups of water rather than 1/4 of a cup of water. Luckily I realized my mistake before I mixed it and I panicked and called in reinforcements, and my poor mother had to help me scoop out as much of the water as we could and add three more boxes of mix and some more eggs and bake it for like three hours and in the end we got this weird sort of fudge that frankly tasted just fine (but honestly – how do you mess up a box brownie recipe…?).
But I don’t care about that now. I care about this stupid engagement cake. It was awesome. It was a yin-yang cake. See, the fiancée likes chocolate cake and the fiancé likes white cake and I made a two-layer deliciously dense moist cake that had chocolate on one half of each layer and white on the other half and then I mixed the two flavors together into a marble in the middle so everyone could have exactly what they wanted. I want you to know how much thought I put into this stupid cake. I went through pages and pages of cake recipes online and I agonized for hours over whether or not to include pudding mix (I did include it). My marbling job was a total masterpiece (Envision a round cake, with one half of the circle white and one chocolate. On the border between these two cake batters, toward the center of this cake I did very little marbling, and as I got out to the edges I fanned the marbling out wider, so that if one were to cut into this cake one could get an entirely pristine white piece with white frosting, a chocolate piece with chocolate frosting, or a marble piece with their choice of white or chocolate frosting. And I did that on two layers of cake and lined them up stinking perfectly. That’s how carefully I marbled that stupid cake). I even cut the tops off both layers so it was perfectly level like a proper bakery cake – I bought actual cardboard cake rounds especially for this cake and I used the microwave turntable to rotate it and everything. And I frosted it in a yin-yang pattern with frosting dots all around the edges and the dots were alternating vanilla-and-chocolate down the sides on the border where the two colors of frosting met, and then I melted white and milk chocolate into equal-sized circles for the yin-yang circles (I had to make three attempts to get the stupid circles the same size) and frosted the engaged couple’s first initials onto those chocolate circles (vanilla frosting on the milk chocolate circle and chocolate frosting on the white chocolate circle)…
And I didn’t even take a stupid PICTURE! It was gorgeous and now no one will ever know it. What’s wrong with me? How did I not know I’d be sitting here almost a year later having like the worst day ever because I can’t find a single stupid picture of this stupid cake?
It’s the Sneaky Hate Spiral (that’s a great website by the way, visit it!). I need a vacation. I need to get the hell away from my computer for a day.
You know what, forget it. I declare that cake not the best cake I ever made. Here’s a pumpkin cake I made for last Halloween. It was great because it was a pumpkin spice cake made in the shape of a pumpkin. Double-pumpkin cake. At the ingenious suggestion of a coworker I made it by sandwiching two bundt cakes together, and it was huge and it took like two pounds of frosting to pull together. But the stem’s the real genius. I melted layer after layer of chocolate chips into this big towering glob and then I used a julienne peeler to carve it into a stem. That’s right. I carved it out of chocolate. That makes this the best cake I’ve made so far, and I intend to make even better ones. Take that, engagement cake!
You can click and zoom in on this masterpiece. Just saying.
I swear we have pictures of it!!! I need to find them!!!
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