Last week I was commissioned to make a cake for my husband to take to his school's career day. Luckily, this was a freebie -- no one was paying for it. All week long I thought about the cake I'd make, and I decided on a white cake with white frosting, strawberry jam in the middle, and a few strawberries on the top. I'd do some borders, but this was going to be a simple, elegant cake. Maybe something along the lines of this:
I should digress here to explain that at the Hobbs household we are very proud skinflints. Even though we live in Texas, we strive to keep our air conditioner off until the very last day possible. I'm perfectly comfortable to go with the windows open and ceiling fans on until it reaches about 82 in the house. At that point we reluctantly shut the windows, crank on the A/C (to 80 degrees), and await the electric bill. I failed to take any of this into account as I set off to bake the cake on Thursday afternoon.
For reasons that may or may not have had to do with the temperature, my from scratch white cakes were not the best. They did not come out of the pan easily and broke a smidge, but not so badly that I didn't think I could skillfully hide their deformity. So a lot was riding on that frosting!
Instead of my usual, go-to icing, I decided to experiment with one of my mom's very good fudge frostings. But instead of using regular, unsweetened chocolate, I decided to try white chocolate. Did I consult a recipe book, or maybe the internet, before I went about this substitution? No. No, I did not.
I had to use a full bag of powdered sugar to reach the consistency I was looking for, and this made the frosting taste like...sweet, sweet sugar. Not like white chocolate. But, that was all the powdered sugar I had, so no going back. I got my cakes on the platter, slathered some of the strawberry jam in between the layers, and set off to frost these hideous cakes.
It wasn't long before I realized there was a problem. The frosting was not sitting on the cake like usual. Instead, it was sliding around and melting off the sides, emphasizing exactly what I'd wanted to hide so badly! Just then it came to me: THIS HOUSE IS 81 DEGREES! I stopped what I was doing, slid the cake in the fridge, closed the windows, and cranked up the air conditioning (to an appalling 76 degrees!). Alas, it was too late. Here's what the cake looked like when it went into the fridge:
After a few minutes I brought out the cake to see what could be done. Maybe I could salvage it? Maybe the icing could be made to stay put? Nah....
As it often happens, once something starts going downhill, there's not much you can do to stop it. Before long, the jam started seeping out the sides, and my white cake became a pink monstrosity:
At this point I just had to laugh. How awful does that cake look!? There was absolutely no way to fix it. All I could do was take some pictures and do a humility check. Also: make alternate plans for a cake for Zach to take to work the next day.
The best part was when Zach got home that evening. The offending cake was in the fridge, and he stopped off there to get some water. I was busy with the kids, and a few minutes later I said, "Zach, I fixed the most awful cake today." "Oh, yeah," he said. "I wasn't sure if it was supposed to look like that or what, so I wasn't going to say anything..." Now there's a smart husband.
Post Script: The make up cake I decided on was a homemade "Sock it to Me Cake," which is basically a sour cream pound cake with streusel filling. It, too, was a disaster. It failed to come out of the pan and looked very, very ugly. Luckily, I had massive amounts of frosting left over from the first cake, so I just generously drizzled it all over the cake, successfully hiding its many flaws.
