Thursday, April 28, 2011

The most hideous cake of all time

This weekend I had plans to make a lovely 3-layer white cake with lemon filling and marshmallow frosting.  Sounds good right? Yeah...

The lemon curd came out great- I have a recipe I cut out of a county living magazine years ago that I love.  Simple, homemade, delicious.  Baked my cake layers, they came out fine.  Right before we were ready to have dessert I made my frosting- it's a marshmallow frosting, a lot of similar recipes call it "7 minute" frosting, the recipe I use actually calls it "finger frosting" and I will explain why later.

Anyway... this is where it all started going downhill.  The frosting didn't fluff.  Wrong word- peak.  I beat it on high for 20 minutes hoping it would do its thing, but it did not.  So I put it on the cake anyway.  But it was kind of heavy and soupy. 


Lovely, right?  It gets far worse.  I put dowels in the cake to support all the layers.  But the top layer started the break apart and slide off.  I tried to save it with more dowels, but to no avail.



One chunk fell off, followed by others...



The structure was severely compromised... so I gave up and scooped it into a dish. 




It was pretty sad.  Thankfully, my family is so great that they all ate it anyway.  Where did I go wrong?  I have reflected on this a little bit and I have some ideas...

First of all I wanted to make a 3-layer cake using box mixes.  A box mix makes 2 9-inch layers, so I thought I would use 2 boxes, make 3 layers, and use the rest of the batter to make 12 cupcakes that I could freeze and use later.  But when I poured my batter into the 3 9-inch pans I thought to myself, there is a lot more rooms in those pans... if I just add a little more batter to each I could have some nice thick layers!  So I did.

Also, I was tired.  I did not feel like greasing and flouring the pans.  So I sprayed them with Pam.  Same thing, right?  They are nonstick pans anyway, what's the point of having nonstick pans if you still have to grease and flour them?

Okay.  So when I took them out of the oven they were a little more dome shaped than I would have liked.  I knew I would need to trim them so they would be flatter.  Then it was time to take them out of the pans... which went okay.  But the middle of the cakes stuck a teeny tiny bit, and made a few little fissures in the center.  Didn't fall apart though.

Next step... the frosting.  The recipe is called "finger frosting" because you mix up all the ingredients in a pot on the stove with your finger until it gets too hot to touch.  Then you know it's done, and you transfer it to the mixer and beat it on high for 10 minutes.  So this finger method... not super precise.  I mean, it relies a lot of the cook's tolerance for pain.  First time I made it I stuck my finger in and thought, "ouch, must be ready!"  them my mom stuck her finger in and was like "that's not hot!  needs more time!"  My mom is a toughie.

Anyway, so first of all I do not like stirring it with my finger the whole time, so I was wisking it with a wisk.  And I was talking to my brother while wisking.  Maybe a little distracted.  When I finaly stuck my finger in it was really hot... well, what I considered to be really hot.  So I put it in the mixer.

Did I overcook the frosting?  I think I may have.  Did that cause it to not peak properly?  It's possible.

So then when I assembled the cake, it fell apart.  Were my layers not flat enough and/or too heavy because I used extra batter?  Maybe.  Was it all aggrevated by the fact that the center of the layers had cracks and were therefore more likely to split?  I'm pretty sure that is the case.  But are the tiny cracks the result of not greasing and flouring the pans properly?  I'm not completely sure.

Anyway, next time I attempt this I will do less "winging it." 

I feel like I need to go bake something pretty right now to redeem myself.