caketastrophe

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Carrot Cake

I made neither a carrot cake nor a coconut cake for Easter dessert. My daughter declared that she hates carrot cake AND coconut cake, and my husband – who had requested those specific cakes in the first place – revealed that his suggestions hadn’t been serious, since no one likes carrot or coconut cake except him.

Instead, I made a strawberry cake.

Slightly wonky but you can’t *really* tell it was a diaster.

It was an utter failure. I severely underbaked the cake layers, so that there was a circle of nearly raw cake in the center of each. Fortunately, I’d made six cupcakes with the extra batter, so I removed the raw cake using a glass, and filled the cavity in the bottom cake with an upside-down cupcake. Then I filled the hole in the top layer with extra frosting. No one seemed to notice and the cake was quite delicious: light and fluffy and strawberry-y.

Hot tip: Macerated strawberries can hide a multitude of sins.

I did not take photos of how raw the layers were, or of the cupcake plug; I was trying to hurry to “fix” things before my husband noticed. He tends to execute things perfectly the first time, so he never needs to come up with creative fixes, and my fear was that he would say my cupcake repair job wouldn’t work, or that he would recommend I throw the whole thing out, and I wanted to try my solution without any anti-problem-solving vibes.

While we ate the strawberry cake, I noted that it was a second choice after carrot cake, which was when I discovered that both of my parents LOVE carrot cake. Okay then.

So I made a carrot cake for their birthdays. Their birthdays are a day apart, and we took them the cake on the day in between so we could give them presents and celebrate with them.

In advance of the baking, I did a LOT of research on carrot cakes. I read a TON of carrot cake recipes. My husband and parents both felt strongly that a carrot cake should have raisins and nuts; my parents were not a huge fan of the idea of pineapple; my dad was the sole “meh” on including coconut in the carrot cake while my mom and husband were solidly “pro coconut,” except in the frosting.

Might as well throw some bananas and tomatoes in there too, is how I feel about carrot cake.

It was surprisingly difficult to find a recipe that included all the things they wanted while excluding all the things they didn’t. I ended up mashing several recipes together to make a carrot cake. Cake hubris at its finest, no? Yet somehow, against all odds, the cake turned out perfectly. My husband liked it so much, he requested that I write down the recipe I used so I can make it again. The recipe is at the bottom of this post.

If you are a person who dislikes recipe blogs because they blather about not-the-recipe for several paragraphs before posting the recipe, and prefer pithy gets-to-the-point recipe posts, well, we’re already 400+ words in at this point and perhaps you’ve already realized you’re reading the wrong blog.

(Possibly you come here because you enjoy or are at least tolerant of my tendency to blather. And blather I shall.)

Cake Expectations

Cake, it seems, has become one of my love languages. Anyone who has read this blog in the past dozen years is well aware of my annual angst over baking a birthday cake for my child. In addition to baking for her, I have now had several opportunities to make cakes for my husband and parents as well.

The thing is, I’m not very good at it. Just reread the bit above about the raw cake centers for a glaring yet all-too-typical example of how not very good at it I am. Something always goes wrong.

  • There was the year I ran out of baking powder and had to switch recipes midstream, at which point I realized I didn’t have the right flour, and once I’d used math to sort that, I ended up needing extra batter and had to make a third batch.
  • This year, in addition to the raw cake layers from Easter, I also managed to somehow split the cream cheese frosting for the carrot cake, which required some tinkering to fix.

I think, over the years, I’ve mellowed a bit. I have more than a decade of cake-baking experience under my belt, and that makes me more confident that I can handle issues should they arise. (Over-confident, some might say.) Of course, I can simply start over if I need to.

But even with the mellowness of age and experience, there is usually that moment when something goes wrong, and I’m trying to come up with a solution, and I’m conscious of the time ticking down to the point at which I will require a complete and edible cake to serve to guests, and the kitchen is over-hot and I still have to shower or dry my hair or get dressed or finish wrapping gifts. THIS is the point when I begin to panic, erasing any and all confidence I began with.

Because I am aware that I’m not very good at baking, I tend to angst about the cake baking quite a bit in advance. I scour recipes. I ask probing, clarifying questions. I research and buy additional tools (in past years, I’ve added a cake leveler and a cake turntable to my collection for this reason).  Over the years, many people have offered up gentle and reasonable suggestions, like… Maybe just BUY A CAKE. That would lift all the stress and anxiety off of my shoulders. It would absolve me of any guilt should the cake not taste utterly delicious. It would free up my time to be more present with my family (and less fretful) or to do any number of things I eschew when I’m in a baking frenzy (showering, exercising, eating meals). And yet I stubbornly persist in making (subpar) cakes.

What kind of cake related character flaw IS this? Some sort of narcissism? Martyr complex?

In my head, it is love. I love these people so much, I want to mark their birthdays in a special way. I love them so much, I want to give them the exact cake they want – no generic yellow cake from a box, no over-sweet chemical-flavored frosting from the grocery store, no overpriced but not-quite-right cake from a bakery.

(I promise you, this is not some belief that MY cakes are better than perfectly serviceable store-bought cakes. For many years, my husband’s birthday request was for a Dairy Queen ice cream cake, and if that’s what he wanted, that’s what he got. My mother-in-law LOVES the frosting a local bakery uses for their cakes, even though I find it tasteless and greasy, so we have gotten her cakes from that bakery for her birthday. If you have a specific treat in mind, you should have it, especially on your birthday!)

It also feels meaningful, to me, to spend several hours thinking about a loved one while I’m baking their Ideal Cake. It’s a personal way to honor them, to think about all the birthdays we’ve been lucky enough to celebrate together, to cherish their presence in my life. This sounds really goopy and kind of stupid, but these are the thoughts that go through my mind while I plan the cake and make my grocery list and do the shopping and measure out the ingredients. I hum and smile to myself.

When they cut into the cake, put that first bite into their mouth, I can finally relax. I have done all I can.

I know – I know – it is Just A Cake, one cake, one moment in a whole long lifetime of moments big and small.

I also know this: The last bit of frosting will melt onto a tongue, the dishes will be rinsed and tucked into the dishwasher, the final crumbs will be swept into the sink and the gift wrap will lie crumpled in the trash. The celebration and the cake will soon join the blur of day-to-day. But I have tried, in my small, ordinary, imperfect way, to make my loved one’s wishes come true, to make them feel seen, and cared for, and understood. Maybe that’s too much to expect from a cake, but it’s why I keep baking.

Carrot Cake

Note on the recipe: This is a mashup of three recipes: “Bill’s big carrot cake” from Dorie Greenspan’s Baking cookbook;  “Mother Thomas’s carrot cake” from Jelly Jules; and Sam’s “Best carrot cake recipe” from SugarSpunRun. The resulting cake is what my mother calls “dense and heavy,” which is exactly what she wanted from a carrot cake. The frosting started out as a pretty standard cream cheese frosting recipe, but I ended up adding a little of this and that to get it to work the way I wanted to.

Note on the serving size: This carrot cake recipe produced enough batter to fill two-and-a-half 6-inch cake pans with enough leftover for six standard cupcakes. The frosting recipe produced enough frosting to cover a mid-size sedan.

Cake Ingredients:

Dry
2 ½ cups (315 g) all-purpose flour
1 ½ tsp baking powder
1 ½ tsp baking soda
2 tsp ground cinnamon

1 tsp ground nutmeg
1 tsp salt

Filling
3 cups (340 g) grated peeled carrots see Note 1
1 cup (125 g) coarsely chopped pecans or walnuts (optional)
1 cup shredded coconut (optional)
½ cup golden raisins (optional)

Wet
1 cup (200 g) white sugar
1 cup (200 g) brown sugar
4 large eggs, at room temperature see Note 2
1 cup canola or vegetable oil
½ cup buttermilk see Note 3

Frosting Ingredients:

4 oz unsalted butter, at room temperature
12 oz cream cheese, at room temperature
¼ tsp salt
¼ cup sour cream, at room temperature
4 cups (500 g) powdered sugar

Instructions:

  1. Preheat the oven to 325 F/163 C. (see Note 4)
  2. Line your baking pans (see Note 5) with parchment paper.
  3. In a medium bowl, whisk the dry ingredients (2 ½ cups/315 g all-purpose flour, 1 ½ tsp baking powder, 1 ½ tsp baking soda, 2 tsp ground cinnamon, 1 tsp ground nutmeg, 1 tsp salt) together.
  4. In a medium bowl, mix the filling ingredients (3 cups/340 g grated peeled carrots, 1 cup/125 g coarsely chopped pecans/walnuts, 1 cup shredded coconut, ½ cup golden raisins) together.
  5. In a mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream together the sugars (1 cup/200 g white sugar, 1 cup/200 g brown sugar) and the oil (1 cup canola or vegetable oil) on medium speed until well-mixed.
  6. With the mixer still running, add the eggs, one at a time, until incorporated.
  7. Scrape down the sides of the mixer, then add the buttermilk and mix until incorporated.
  8. After scraping down the sides of the mixer again, add the dry ingredients to the mixer. On low speed, mix until a few streaks of flour remain.
  9. Using a spatula, gently fold in the filling ingredients.
  10. Divide the batter among the baking pans and bake them for 30-50 minutes, rotating them at the halfway point. (see Note 6) Check for doneness by inserting a toothpick in the center of each cake; the toothpick should come out clean or with a few crumbs.
  11. Allow the cakes to cool for five minutes in their pans, then, using a knife to release the edges of the cake from the pans, remove them to a wire rack to cool completely.
  12. While the cakes are cooling, combine the cream cheese and butter in your mixer on medium speed until smooth.
  13. With the mixer running, add the salt and sour cream and mix until incorporated.
  14. Scrape down the bowl of the mixer, then add powdered sugar, one cup at a time, and mix until smooth.
  15. Wait until your cake is completely cool before frosting.
  16. Store frosted cake in the fridge for 3ish days, or wrap tightly in plastic wrap to freeze.

Notes:

  1. I grated my own carrots because I’d read that using pre-grated carrots didn’t add enough moisture to the cake. But I haven’t tried pre-shredded carrots my self, so maybe they are a fine and useful shortcut.
  2. I often forget to remove the eggs from the fridge early enough to bring them to room temperature, so I have found that submerging them in a small bowl of warm water does the trick in about 5-10 minutes.
  3. I did not have buttermilk on hand, so I added ½ tablespoon of white vinegar to a measuring cup, then filled it up to the ½-cup mark with whole milk, and let the mixture sit for about 5ish minutes.
  4. Depending on the size of your cake pans, you may want to set a cookie sheet on the oven rack while you pre-heat the oven. When you are ready to bake your cake, set the filled cake pans on the hot cookie sheet. This enables easier rotating.
  5. My inspiration recipes called for a variety of pans (8-inch round cake pans, a 10-x15-inch rectangular cake pan, or 9-inch round cake pans). I used 6-inch round cake pans, but then I was able to make another 6-inch round that wasn’t quite as tall plus 6 cupcakes with the remaining batter.
  6. The baking time will vary based on your oven’s temperament, the size of your baking pans, and on other mysterious factors I cannot identify. For my 6-inch baking pans, I started with about 15 minutes, rotated the pans, then baked them for an additional ten minutes before testing the centers with a toothpick. Then I rotated them again and continued to bake them, checking them at 5-minute intervals (and rotating them each time) until they were done. For my cupcakes, the initial bake was 10 minutes, then I checked them at 5-minute intervals after rotating them until they were done.
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A Satisfying Cake Experience

Carla’s rainbow cake turned out FAR better than I had hoped.

Rainbow Cake Final 4

Firstly, I asked Carla which order the layers should go. I said, “Do you want it to go ‘purple, blue’ like the Bubble Guppies song?” And she thought about it and said, “No, that’s wrong. I want it to be like a real rainbow.” Although she then asked “Where’s the white layer” and I had to assure her that there would be white frosting. (She has also since begun singing the song “blue, purple” despite the Bubble Guppies’ maddening insistence on “purple, blue.”)

Let’s back up a bit now. Because while the title and the first sentence of this post indicate Unadulterated Success, I will admit that there were some small setbacks. Especially when it came to the cupcakes. But a bit when it came to the cake, too.

For some reason, I am determined to make Carla’s cakes from scratch. I don’t know why. My husband (indulgently) thinks I am a wacko. My mother, who intuited my birthday-related stress from thousands of miles away, understood completely. She – who worked a demanding, full-time job throughout my childhood and beyond – made all of my Halloween costumes from scratch because of the same genetic quirk.

So I used my tried-and-true Sally’s Baking Addiction recipe for Carla’s cake. It is a good recipe, and it makes a very nice vanilla-y cake. But I realized only very belatedly that it is an oil-free cake. And – possibly because of that, although I can’t say for sure since I am a baking amateur at best – I think that makes it kind of heavy. I comforted myself for the heaviness of the cake by choosing to believe it makes the cake very easy to cut and layer. But I think perhaps next year I will try a different recipe. OR I will try to force myself to use boxed cake mix, which is what I used for the cupcakes, and which turned out light and fluffy and yet perfectly moist.

Of course, I was converting Sally’s recipe – which was for cupcakes – into what I needed for a six-layer rainbow cake. So I instantly made a mistake. My model cake used 8-inch cake pans. But I didn’t have 8-inch cake pans. I had three 9-inch cake pans OR two 6-inch cake pans. I decided to go with the 9-inchers, which resulted in super thin, super flat layers.

Rainbow Cake Layers in Oven

Too thin! Abort! Abort!

But! I stopped while I was ahead! I only made those two layers, and when I realized they would result in a very thin cake, I recalibrated. I mixed up another batch of Sally’s cake batter. And I went with the 6-inchers.

IMMEDIATELY better. They turned out very even in size.

Rainbow Cake Layers Six

They are not in ROY G BIV order here and it is Driving Me Crazy.

To get the color to be so vibrant, I used Wilton gel food coloring. And I ended up using a LOT of each color. Maybe 1/4 to 1/3 a teaspoon of each, which is a LOT. (Note: Sally’s recipe uses only egg whites, which I think definitely helps with the brilliant colors. Using egg yolks makes the cake more yellow than white.)

Rainbow Cake Batter Colors

I used my new Wilton cake leveler to cut the tops off the layers.  Okay, correction: MY HUSBAND used the Wilton cake leveler to cut the tops off the layers.

rainbow-cake-leveler.jpg

I carefully studied the directions (“directions”) for how to use it. And then I watched a video about how to use it, but I still couldn’t get it to work. My husband on the other hand got it to work just fine, and he did all six for me, which made me feel like he was being involved which was a nice feeling, and plus, I ended up with nice, flat tops to all the layers. I saved the tops in a Ziploc bag; they are in my freezer. (It turns out there are a lot of things you can do with leftover cake. I tried one of them – making a cake-pop-within-a-cupcake – with limited success, but there are other things to do as well. Might make for a fun project to try with Carla.)

Then I made the frosting – the same recipe that Sally used for her cupcakes.

Oh! And this is where I tell you my Shocking Vanilla News. Sally’s cupcakes and frosting both call for vanilla beans. And vanilla beans have always been expensive. I think the grocery store brand usually was about $11.99 for one decrepit bean. But last year I discovered that Penzey’s sells vanilla beans, and I was able to get two nice, plump beans per jar for $8.99.

That’s what I assumed I would pay this year, too; I have no concept of the changing price of vanilla beans. But this year, two beans was $18.99. EIGHTEEN NINETY NINE. I expressed my shock to the Penzey’s salesperson, who said that there’s something going on in the region that produces Penzey’s vanilla, and it was pushing the price up. She said she thought it would be temporary. But SHEESH. (Listen, I am selfishly NOT looking up the details about why the price is so high; I am hopeful it is something like an unusual drought and not a horrible civil war or something, but there are only so many things I have the capacity to worry about, you know? I am trying to limit the number of things I cry over these days.) It turned out it was a good thing I spent the $18.99 for two beans, because, as I noted above, I ended up having to make a second batch of cake batter.

Having learned from previous mistakes, I did a crumb coat of frosting and then put the whole cake in the fridge overnight. This is what it looked like right before I did the crumb coat.

Rainbow Cake Pre Crumb Coat 2

And then the next day, I added another layer of frosting and decorated the whole thing with these little rainbow-hued non-pareils.

It was hands-down the best looking cake I’ve ever made.

I don’t think it was the best tasting, though. First of all, the cake was dense and heavy as I mentioned above. Secondly, the frosting was VERY sweet. I mean, it was just sugar and butter, so it wasn’t a surprise; I didn’t expect it to taste like pickles or something. But it was too much. Probably the thick top layer on top of the crumb layer didn’t help. If I were to do it again, I would find a less-sweet frosting to use. Maybe a cream-cheese style (which is my personal favorite) or something that was more like a traditional buttercream, with less sugar. A third option, I suppose, would be to layer the cake with something other than frosting. I would normally go for a curd of some sort, but that wouldn’t really work with the aesthetic of this particular cake. Maybe a whipped cream frosting would be okay.

The cupcakes were another matter.

If you will recall, I made the rainbow cake for Carla’s actual birthday. She and her grandparents and her father/my husband and I went out to her favorite restaurant for dinner, and then we came home to eat cake and open presents.

But her birthday party was several days later. It was a make-your-own-pizza-party at a popular chain and we invited twelve of her friends and it was DELIGHTFUL. But I wanted to make cupcakes for that party, see above RE: wacko, so I did.

Rainbow Cupcake Tray

I think I’d gotten a bit cake-saturated by the time I got to the cupcakes, so my head wasn’t in the game. Plus, I’d decided to use a store-bought cake mix, which made me a little cocky. So I kept making stupid mistakes. I forgot to add the water to the first batch. (I was able to salvage that one with math; I’d already separated the oddly too-thick batter into its separate colors. When I discovered my omission, I simply divided the required amount by six and stirred the appropriate amount into each color.) Then I forgot to add the eggs to the second batch. (That one I had to throw away.) Then, when I finally got to the frosting, I’d left the cream cheese out all day… and despite varying reports online about whether cream cheese is safe to eat after that long (answers ranged from “it’s only okay if you’ve left it out for no more than four hours” to “I’ve left it out all night and it’s fine!”), the resulting batch of frosting I made had a very weird texture and I couldn’t in good conscience feed it to twelve of Carla’s preschool friends. (I ate some of it and have lived to tell the tale. But I’m not going to use preschoolers as guinea pigs.) So I scrapped it and made some more too-sweet icing – although this time I used a Martha Stewart recipe because I was plum out of vanilla bean.

Making the cupcakes into nice even rainbow layers was HARD. I tried the “use a spoon” method. And then I tried the “put each color into a separate sandwich bag” method. And then I tried the “drop whatever you have in wherever it fits” method. I kept running out of one color or another, so that the layers were never perfect.

Version 1.0.0

OH WELL. They were all pretty. And they were all super delicious as well.

Version 1.0.0

And hopefully Carla is DONE with rainbows. Because I don’t know that I will have the kind of patience that comes with novelty if she asks me to do it again.

rainbow-cake-final.jpg

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Cupcakes, Cake Math, Caketastrophe, Cake

Much of this week has involved in medicinal baking. Baking is excellent for occupying one’s mind. And it has the delightful side benefit of producing delicious medicinal treats.

First up was cupcakes for Carla to take to school. I did end up using the Test Kitchen recipe I mentioned here and it seemed fine. Here’s where I have to admit that I’m not a big cake person. I’d rather eat tacos.

To top the cupcakes, I made the frosting from Sally’s Baking Addiction, and again: seemed fine. Not as vanilla-y as I was hoping (even though you can see the little black vanilla specks in the frosting), but acceptably sweet and frosting-y. My husband on the other hand – for whom cake tops the list of all foods, well, maybe tied with ice cream for second place with peanut butter coming in first – said that the frosting was the best I’ve ever made.

For the filling, I did make the blueberry filling from Mother Thyme. It was perfect: sweet but not overly so, and the cornstarch made it nice and thick so there was no seepage.

 

Nothing makes cake more palatable (in my opinion) than filling it with something delicious. Which is why I cut a little well in 48 miniature cupcakes, filled each little well with blueberry sauce, and capped each one with its own personal cake hat. Then I topped each cupcake with a daub of frosting and a blueberry.

Third birthday cupcakes 1

The frosting doesn’t quite cover up the filling well in this photo, but whatever. STILL TASTY.

 

I overfilled the first batch of cupcakes, so they became my “test batch” (i.e., the ones that I have been eating for breakfast). But the Test Kitchen recipe made a TON of batter, so I had enough to make two entire trays of mini-cupcakes. The second batch was perfect, so those were the ones I sent with Carla to school.

I think they turned out pretty cute.

Third birthday cupcakes 2

Turns out that I bought way too many blueberries. Way. Too. Many.

The next baking project was, of course, the cake.

The cupcakes were a success; I should have just copied exactly what I’d done, but in cake form. Right? Well, turns out I didn’t have enough baking powder to make a second batch of the Test Kitchen recipe. Baking powder is one of those ingredients I just ASSUME I have enough of, you know? And the Test Kitchen recipe calls for A Lot of baking powder, so it’s really kind of a fluke that I didn’t have enough. All that said, I DIDN’T have enough. And I really didn’t want to go to the grocery store, so I thought, the frosting from Sally’s Baking Addiction was great, so why not try the accompanying cake recipe?

The first issue I ran into was that Sally’s recipe called for all-purpose flour, and I had spent something like $8 on two boxes of cake flour, so I was damn sure going to use THAT. But it turns out there is a difference between the two (surprise), and in order to use the cake flour, I had to use MATH.

MATH. Whilst baking.

(I do not care for math.)

Cake flour is less dense (or something; I sort of skimmed the science part of it) than all-purpose flour, so you need to use slightly more cake flour if you’re substituting. Two tablespoons extra cake flour per cup of all-purpose flour, to be exact. Of course, the recipe didn’t call for straight cups of flour, so my Cake Math involved fractions.

Once I got the math figured out, I really got going. The batter turned out exactly like Sally promised – nice and thick (and very different from the Test Kitchen batter – I know they are Different Recipies, but they were SO DIFFERENT: melted butter vs. tablespoons of room temperature butter; GREATLY different amounts of baking powder; baking soda vs. none; etc).

But Sally’s recipe was for cupcakes, and – even though she’d provided a helpful note for converting to 9-inch cakes (which I admittedly didn’t read until AFTER the fact) – I was using 6-inch cake pans.

So I turned to the trusty Wilton website, which has all sorts of conversions for different sized pans. For my size pan – 6-inch round, 2-inch deep – it said use two cups of batter. And I got barely two cups into one pan, and then there was… about a cup leftover for the other pan.

SO I HAD TO MAKE A SECOND BATCH OF CAKE BATTER.

Finally I got the cakes in the oven, and they puffed up WAY too high and then the tops cracked. Which according to my panicked googling, was from either 1) too hot an oven 2) opening the oven while it was cooking 3) overfilling the pans or 4) over use of a rising agent. (I am going to go with option 3, which means that I didn’t actually need to make a second batch of batter. SIGH.)

Well, I’m not going to say that WASN’T helpful, but it didn’t do much in the way of preventing the cracking as it was happening.

The cakes were cooking and cooking while still being all gooey in the center. Sally’s recipe specifically said that the cakes should be pure white and NOT turn golden brown, but the outside of my raw cakes was DEFINITELY golden brown. I was in a CAKE PANIC, let me tell you.

As my ruined cakes were cooking, I began on the frosting. And realized that I was out of powdered sugar.

So as soon as the cakes were out of the oven, I ran to the grocery store. While there, per my husband’s wise counsel, I got enough ingredients for the Test Kitchen cake recipe as well, just in case the Sally’s cakes were inedible. The only thing I didn’t get was more vanilla beans. I got my previous beans from Penzey’s, which sells a tube of THREE Madagascar beans for $8.99. The grocery store had two beans for $14.89. No thank you. Penzeys4Lyfe.

I returned, loaded down with powdered sugar. I removed the cracked cakes from their pans, washed the pans, and loaded them up with Much Less of the remaining batter.

After that, things went better. The second cakes were perfect. Normal, flat-topped, pure white. The frosting turned out just fine.

I cut the tops of the cracked cakes and tasted them; to my relief, they tasted perfectly fine. If you’re keeping track, this means I had FOUR cakes.

So I made a game-time decision to use three of them as the layers in my cake, rather than trying to cut any of them in half. It was a good decision.

As Alison suggested, I spread each layer with a thin coating of frosting to make sort of a barrier between the cake and the filling. Then I spread a nice thick layer of the blueberry filling from the previous day’s cupcaking. Per Holland Wax (a REAL cake baker!), I tried to make a little “dam of frosting” to hold the blueberry filling in, but I think my frosting was too loose at that point to dam well. The filling was nice and solid though; by that point, it had been in the fridge overnight and had a nice heavy-jelly consistency, so the dam wasn’t entirely necessary. (The frosting barrier probably wasn’t necessary either, but hey – more frosting!)

Once all three layers were stacked, I went to work frosting the whole cake. It was going well until I got to a part where the filling had oozed out a little, and then I got filling mixed in with the frosting which gave part of the cake a purplish tinge. That’s when I decided to put the whole cake in the fridge – along with the frosting – and take a shower.

When I got back, the cake and the frosting had tightened up a bit, and I was able to finish frosting everything without any more filling incidents. Then I decorated the top and sides and added some blueberries and candles. And some more blueberries. I can’t stress enough how many blueberries I have in my house at this time.

The finished cake wasn’t perfect, but it was cute. Carla exclaimed, “It’s so CUTE!” when she saw it, and the whole family seemed to enjoy eating it. So I will call it a success.

Now I am tired.