Diary of a Low Budget Superhero

I just spent some more time looking at the Cakewrecks site. PK posted it on Facebook a few months ago and I can't help checking in periodically to see what hell flour, eggs and butter hath wrought.

Follow up:

What in the name of all that doesn't suck are some of those bakers thinking? If you're hired to bake a cake, and the whole cake falls apart at the last minute, serve a different cake! Go get a harmless cake from the Stop & Shop and offer the poor cake-buying-customer an explanation instead of a sticky, embarrassing, falling apart pile of moist and colorful crumbs.

Actually. Just as I sailed into the end of that little rant I recalled suddenly that I myself once made a cakewreck! Oooooo, if anyone has photos, wouldn't it be great. Maybe Sooz does, though I think she only had her phone with her for taking photos. I will check.

Here's what happened. We Rock and Roll Social committee people had convened for a planning session prior to the December Social. This was a couple of years ago. 2006 sounds right. Andrea, who is presently enrolled in culinary school and has worked in bars and restaurants her entire adult life, enthusiastically suggested we have a cake or two at our event. She got me stoked about it, we were each going to bake a cake, a decorative one. Snowman, maybe? I envisioned three round cakes set end to end, smallest round for the head, coconut shag frosting and appropriately jolly buttons, eyes and bow tie.

Here's the thing about Andrea. I love her, I really do. But at first she's excited about something, say baking cakes together, and then you can't get her on the phone for a month. When you see her again it's all hugs and smiles, but for that month, if you need something, such as coordination on that whole cake thing you'd discussed over dinner one November night, well, you're screwed.

So no Andrea. I decided to go for it anyway. I've baked. I bake. I'm not the world's best, but I can turn out a birthday cake that's tasty and pretty. So on the day of the Social I left work early, around 2pm. I baked a couple of sheet cakes and let those cool. Then I cut the sheet cakes into squares, and stacked the squares with frosting in between. My plan was to frost it green, and stick M&M candies into the frosting. Get it? Tree. Christmas tree. Towering tree cake.

I was really proud of the idea, because I'd never made a tall cake like that before, and I was all smug about figuring out on my own how to make it tree-like. That's right, on my own. Without Google and without cracking a single cookbook! Of course! Stack squares of decreasing size, it'll resemble a tree. It started off looking something like:

It ended up looking like...well, a sticky, embarrassing, falling apart pile of moist and colorful crumbs.

OK, it wasn't that bad. People could tell it was a tree.

But there were problems.

Problem number one. I am not Duff from Ace of Cakes.

Problem number two. I unfortunately selected for my masterpiece a nice, super moist pudding-in-the-mix style of cake mix. It was moist. Very spongy. Too spongy.

Problem number three. I severely underestimated the amount of food coloring I would need to turn white frosting the right shade of pine green. After hours of mixing blue and green, the best I could get was a sort of minty toothpaste hue.

While frosting it, the soft, moist cake kept giving to the frosting knife. The sides that were sliced (as in, not the natural cake pan edges, but the cuts) were totally crumby, and as the frosting knife glided over the cake, the frosting pretty much sloughed off crumbs along the way. When I was very very gentle I could cover the cake, but the frosting acted as though "sticking to cake" wasn't its only job in the world. There were crumbs spread all throughout the surface.

Problem number four? I had to manhandle the thing so much that it began to look a bit teetery. So I stuck wooden chopsticks through the top, down to the bottom, to kind of like, pin it together.

The M&M portion of the process, which should have been the fun part, was pretty much a desperate exercise in "hoping to cover the worst mistakes with these M&Ms that do not, after all, look much like ornaments." I even ended up using some store-bought icing to squeeze a hesitant galloping line of white "garland" around the teetering, crumby, minty green layers.

Ha ha! Those of you with colorful imaginations are having a great time right now.

In retrospect, I really should have just done the three-circle snowman thing.