Disasters with Cakes

I like to cook. I am not always very good at cooking and sometimes my cooking experiments go awry. When I was in junior high and high school I really developed a love for baking so it became my job to make desserts for family dinner and I received a cake decorating kit for my birthday I started experimenting a lot with cakes.

As everyone knows, chocolate cake with chocolate frosting is the best kind of cake. So for my first attempt at decorating a cake I made a chocolate cake and frosted it with chocolate frosting. I made extra frosting so I could use the cool little tips to make flowers and pretty pictures. The only problem, I discovered, is that making brown frosting a different color is rather difficult and the results are often unappealing. The only color I could make was some strange green color so I looked at the brown and green frosting and promptly wrote “camouflage” across the top since that was what the colors reminded me of. The cake tasted fine but my mother was a little disturbed at eating a cake that had sickly green frosting that tasted chocolaty.

My cakes became pretty extravagant, although my decorating never really improved, unless you count using white frosting as a base for colors. I made layered cakes (sometimes one layer would be chocolate and the other yellow). I made marbled cakes. I made layered marbled cakes. I tried a couple of times with a bunt pan but decided that it was too big of a hassle. I had the standard cake recipe memorized and could change ingredients around to make what I wanted and I was pretty impressed with my mad cake baking skills.

My older brother was always excited when he saw the large cylinder Tupperware on the counter because that normally meant there was a cake underneath it. I had been watching my younger siblings one night and my brother came home from work and ran into the kitchen because he saw the Tupperware. He picked it up excitedly and stared at the pile of crumbs that I had drizzled runny frosting over. He looked at me in confusion. I was completely embarrassed that my evening’s attempt had turned out so horrible. I replied hotly “Don’t ask. I. Don’t. Care.” The cake tasted fine but I think it was easier to eat with a spoon than a fork and we used it as ice cream topper a couple of times.

I haven’t learned. I still experiment. Now I am into marshmallows and peanut butter variations of cakes and brownies. My husband happily eats everything I cook (but with how much Tabasco he puts on stuff I don’t think he actually tastes some meals). I am grateful though because there have been a couple of times that I won’t eat what I cook. However, the day I make a cake that he puts Tabasco on is the day I know I have truly failed.