Grounded for Life

Have you ever had to perform reconstructive surgery on a cake?  Or, in a related question, grounded a dish from ever leaving the house?

You can already tell that this is not a baking success story.

This month's Cake Slice challenge was easy enough, or so it seemed:  a vanilla genoise cake generously daubed with a coffee syrup and filled and iced with a tiramisu filling of marscapone, eggs and rum.  Sounds good, right?  I'm sure someone's was good, but mine was not.



And to top it all off, my camera was being weird last night.



The problem is that it wasn't even an interesting disaster.  As they say in theatre, if you're going to flub a line, flub it with style.  Make it look purposeful.  Or, at the very least, create a trainwreck of such epic proportions that people can't help but stop and stare.  As an aside, my friend Jill told me that I had to look at the website Cake Wrecks--if you haven't seen it, go look (after you finish reading this post, of course) and gawk at the sheer awfulness.

This cake was none of those things.  It started promisingly enough;  the egg concoction that went into the cake was beautiful and fluffy--I have the photos to prove it!--and then once the butter and the flour mixture were incorporated, the batter just sank before my eyes.  Just to complete the experiment, I baked the cake layers up.  They looked like the sad cousin of a dutch-baby pancake, but less tasty.  The layers were rubbery, flat and just sad.

And then, just because I don't know when to quit, I filled and frosted the sad little non-layers.  It looked passable if a little flat until you sliced into it.  With those rubbery little pancakes, it was inedible.

The marscapone filling/frosting was too good to go to waste, though, so of course I had to operate.  I made a beautiful pound cake (recipe on that this weekend), which proved that I did not have the baking equivalent of a black thumb. 

I then sliced the pound cake, duly swabbed the slices with the coffee syrup, and then scraped all the marscapone off the little pancakes and reconstructed the creation with the pound cake. 

The result?  Eh, it was fine.  I think I had pretty much given up on the dessert by this point, and the pound cake wasn't a great match for the marscapone, which was a little surprising. 

David then made a point of throwing his partially-eaten slice away and taking lots of pictures of it in the trash for me to post.  Thanks, honey.

I'm not posting the recipe for the cake because I think the recipe works, at least for some, but certainly not for me.  Next time I want tiramisu, I will use the tried and true ladyfinger method. 

Throw me a bone, here--what is your worst baking disaster?