Birthday Cake Fail

Life is about making memories.  Boy do I have memories sometimes!

Last week my hubby told me that one of his friends who has moved back to the area was having his 30th birthday today actually.  He asked if we could have him over at some point to celebrate his birthday.  I said ok.  Then he decided we’d just have him come to Sunday Night Dinner after Early had invited him a few weeks before.

So then hubby asked if I would make Robert a birthday cake.  I said sure.  Saturday night I was busy helping Tbug with making Rock Candy so hubby said he’d bake the cake for me.

Usually people start getting fits about “Over the Hill” once you hit 40, but since Robert is older than both of us, I thought I would be ornery and make him an “Over the Hill” cake.  I had it all planned out.  I was going to make a hill.  One side was going to be green “grass” and the other side black “dirt”.

Pampered Chef has a glass batter bowl that you can bake in.  Most people use them for the Barbie Doll cakes.

Now I usually only bake cakes in metal pans so I don’t have experience in glass pans/bowls.

I told him to bake it at 350 like the package said and we did it for 30 minutes and then decided we needed additional time.

So when we thought it was finally cooked all the way through we pulled it out, cooled it and covered it.

Jump ahead to Sunday afternoon.  I spent the day rearranging my house and cleaning my floors.  About 3:30 I went to start decorating my cake for 5pm Sunday Dinner.  I opened the lid on the bowl and the cake had collapsed in the middle.  So hubby asked me what I was going to do.  I was like, well…… I guess bake another one.  So I jumped in and got another one in the oven in my trusty 9″ round metal pans.

Now if you know anything about cakes, they have to cool before you ice them or you have problems.  Well I didn’t have that time…….

So instead of making my trusty icing, I remembered Pioneer Woman made her hubby a chocolate cake with chocolate icing so I thought well change of plans, I’ll get this baked, ice it in her icing and be good to go.

Yeah Right! We all know better!

So while the cake was baking I looked up her icing recipe.  3 cups heavy cream… check.  24 ounces of chocolate…. oh crap I only have 14ish.  and Vanilla…. check.

So I decided to half the icing recipe.  A little over a cup and a half of heavy cream, a little over 12 oz chocolate and viola….. right?  Think again apparently……

So you heat the heavy cream to very hot, dump it on the chocolate to melt the chocolate and mix thoroughly and then put in the fridge to cool completely.  OMG you’ve got to be kidding me!  So I put it in the deep freezer for 15 minutes.  Why not, right?  So then the cakes came out of the oven and I got them out of the pans so they could be cooling.  Got the icing out of the Deep Freezer and put the whisk attachment on my mixer and set it to town making it light and airy… although it wasn’t becoming light and airy at all.

Finally after 15 minutes of trying I was pushing 5pm so I just started icing the cake with it.  Ha!  It was so runny it was falling off the cake.  I finally got fed up and decided I needed to go change my clothes (put on jeans, get out of my grubby shorts I was in) so hubby jumped in watching the icing.

10 minutes later hubby had added powdered sugar trying to get it to set up, it didn’t.  It didn’t get light and airy.  It was after 5.  Hubby and Robert left so Robert wouldn’t completely see what I was doing.  I called it good, slabbed the icing on the cake and went to Pokey & Early’s.  Boy I was mad at this point.  I took cake decorating classes.  I’m good at this.  And this cake looked like crap in my opinion.

I got there and Early’s fridge was empty so I threw it in there and stormed out of the house.

I would like to report that the cake was awesome, the icing was great even though it didn’t do what it was supposed to, and not much cake was left.  Oy!