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Friday, January 20, 2012

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?






32 comments:

  1. I was serving some cheesecake to some mates who had come over to hang out.. It wasn't until one of them pointed out that it was really runny and liquidy and that it defo's wasn't right.. So I went and checked the recipe.. it was meant to be a BAKED cheesecake... WOOPS! Lol so it happens to all of us I guess :P

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  2. LoL,,,,You are not the only one :) just keep trying,I'm not good in baking either,one time I made something with strawberry ( my own recipe ha,,ha,,ha,, ) end up in the trash can after I try a bite of it :) No,,,No,,,No,,, BANG !!! In to the trash can :)
    Ridwan

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  3. Did you incorporate a little of the batter into the butter first then a folded that into the mixture? I read those directions wrong myself and didn't realize it until later. My batter turned out fine, but then when I went to transfer it into the pan, it started deflating some what. I rushed the pans to the oven in a panic. The cake turn out ok, but did sink a little. Next time around I think I'm not greasing the side of the pan so the batter has something to cling onto (I read this on a different Genoise recipe, and I will definately not skip the butter step.

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  4. Awww, I'm sorry! I can relate - baking and I do not work well with each other. The flavors sound amazing, too bad the consistency failed :/

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  5. Baking is not always my best friend. Tempering chocolate - I think it's an art. Cake Wrecks makes it all better.

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  6. I was set on posting a brownie recipe (set for tomorrow) and I baked and baked my old standby exactly TWICE and flubbed them both times. (I have no idea what the deal was.) I finally went with a new "old standby." (I did give up and just threw the two disasters in the trash.) That is, however, not my worse disaster: I tried to make a holiday fig cake from Martha Stewart about six years ago. It still haunts me as my worst baking experience EVER!

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  7. When baking goes bad, it can go REALLY bad. I posted my experience trying to make pavlova a few months ago. It collapsed and was a disaster. If it is any consolation, I enjoyed reading your post. :P

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  8. I think the worst disaster I had was when a pie fell on the floor coming out of the oven! It was in one of those cheap foil pans because I was going to take it to a pot luck. I think I would rather have something that failed in the baking process than have a success hit the floor. However, both have a sad ending! Either way at least you can say an effort was made, better than no effort at all. Enjoy the weekend!

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  9. i have a recipe for eggless chocolate-orange tiramisu that i developed last year for an event. don't ask me how many screw-ups went into the process... i feel your pain! oh, and your significant other needs to be in the doghouse... LOL

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  10. My most recent baking disaster involved my good for nothing oven. I needed to bring a dessert for a potluck. I made cookies, but after 30 minutes, the first batch was barely firm. They ended up in a big clump in Tupperware for my husband to eat with a fork. Next, I decided to make brownies. I turned off the oven and then turned it back on to get it thinking that it was a new day (perhaps a WORKING day!). I baked up the brownies, but time was getting short and we needed to be going to the dinner. I asked my husband to cut the brownies. Instead of carefully and slowly cutting them, he sawed through them, taking most of the crumbs along with the knife. I was left with sad, little brownies in odd rectangular shapes. Not my best moment.

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  11. Mom had a glass jar filled with what I thought was salt. We had the sweetest pasta ever since it was sugar that was added to the water... horribly ruined pasta... but a lesson learned never assume whats in a jar or use too much of it!

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  12. Sorry to hear that yours did not turn out well. I had to skip this month's bake, but have been thinking about making it. Probably will try after the Chinese New Year holidays are over. Thanks for the tips, will keep that in mind.

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  13. I'm sorry you had a baking mini-disaster! The trash taking pictures would be something honey bunny would do! As for my disaster - it's not baking, but I once made a casserole and to this day I STILL don't know what happened....but I couldn't get it out of the pan. When I did finally get it out - the finish of the pan came up along with it! Needless to say, we went out to dinner!

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  14. I would love to give you a big credit for trying. Look at me, I don't bake at all! If I bake something, everyone wonders what happened to Nami... seriously. I don't have experience enough to tell what is good recipe or how to adapt from original recipes. And even I follow, something happens in between.... I shared only few desserts on my blog that I'm always successful with too. You keep inspiring me!

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  15. I baked James a cake for his birthday, but the only cake pan we had at the time that was the correct size was one of those floppy silicon pans, so I put the batter into it and then put the pan on a cookie sheet. Which was a cheap crappy warped cookie sheet, and it cooked the cake at an angle. So one side was dried out and nearly burnt and the other side was slightly doughy. Damn fine middle though.

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  16. Nice to hear I'm not the only one who has kitchen disasters. Most of them can be rescued but there have een a few like your poor cake. My sister's wedding cake was a disaster from start to finish. First the loosebottomed tin lost its loose bottom as I was transferring the largest layer to the oven - cleaned the oven a treat though! Then when version No.2 was finally baked and iced and assembled, it fainted just after the happy couple sliced into it. Flub it with style? Well, it's a moment they sure remember from their wedding day ;)

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  17. Thats a quick thinking on overcoming the kitchen disaster. Mine is always the cake cracking to the max, suppose I over do it when adding in the flour. Well, I think we learn, improvised and move on. Glad to hear it was fine with what you did.

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  18. Well, if a wonderful baker like you can have a mishap while baking, I don't feel bad with all my hockey pucks and cake disasters then. :) This just shows that it happens to the best of us... you'll be pulling out a perfectly beautiful cake from the oven before you know it. Have a great weekend! Ramona :)

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  19. I'm sorry about your cake. Nothing is more upsetting to me than a failed attempt at baking. I just made a brownie pie last night. The frosting and crust were beautiful, and the brownie seemed pretty good too until I cut into it. It wasn't cooked, not even close. I was so distraught. I must've stuck a toothpick in it 100 times, and it came out clean each time! So how was the brownie undercooked?? It was so disappointing. I've had plenty of other blunders from burning the s*** out of cookies to dropping a perfect chocolate cake on the floor. Life is rough sometimes.

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  20. I had a few mishaps in the last year and the half... my main mistake..? forgetting an ingredient or two! forgetting a step in the method..... had to throw stuff in the bin more than a couple of times. But at least we tried our best!

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  21. Yeah, leave it to hubbys for their honest opinions! Thank goodness mine wouldn't think of taking a photo of one of my flops...but it did make for an amusing post. Oh, I've had so many flops over the years...most failures involve yeast that I tried to hurry along and killed! Sorry your cake was not a success~

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  22. Poor cake! I'm constantly trying to rectify experiments gone bad - once i made sweet potato biscuits that looked more like melted turns. *shudder*

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  23. Here's mine: I had asked my husband for some of those collapsible measuring cups for Christmas one year. One day I was using them to make biscotti, and the dough seemed a little soft. I slapped that sucker in the fridge for awhile thinking maybe I'd just let the butter get too soft. I live in Georgia, it gets hot, it could happen... When it came out of the fridge, it seemed nice and firm, so I shaped it into a log, slapped it on my cookie sheets (which are completely flat, meaning no lip) and walked away. 15 minutes later something was on fire in the bottom of my oven - the biscotti has leaked everywhere and caught on fire on the heating coils. Turns out when I measured the flour, I hadn't un-collapsed the measuring cups all the way, so I only added about half of what the recipe called for! You can bet I've NEVER done that again! Not only did I have to clean the oven, but then I had to pry that stuff off the cookie sheets!

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  24. Oh dear, sometimes things just don't turn out as they are meant to. I can bake a recipe I've had sucess with for years and then suddenly it will fail (usually when making it for guests!)for no reason. Lets hope next months cake is better :)
    Thanks for baking with us

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  25. Rest easy....mine will join yours as a cousin in the dump! Waste of time, but a learning experience, for sure!

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  26. Oh I'm so sorry it didn't turn out the way you hoped. Thank you for sharing this though. It's encouraging to see support in the not-so-succesful topic.

    One of my worst was when I burned the chicken so bad the bone crumbled in my hands. I had to get creative with that one. Then there was the time the BBQ caught on fire and the sausages were burnt like struck matches...

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  27. Oh dear! I know it feels to have a cake disaster. So sorry that this one didn't turn out as you wanted it to.

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  28. PS...back to thank you for the sweet words of condolence. xo

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  29. Oh no! So sorry to hear things did not turn out for you! I have performed surgery on cakes a few times in my day. Baking has just not been my thing and I'm not always the most exact with my measurements, but it is important to be for baking!

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  30. Thanks for all the comments! Misery loves company, so it's good to hear about others' baking woes too.

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  31. oh goodness, how about when i poured 1 1/4 cups of apple juice into a cake when it was only suppose to be a 1/4 cup...or after trusting my pup in the house alone for 20 minutes decided to help herself to the spice cake cooling on the counter leaving the chocolate one untouched...yes, yes I could go on and on!

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  32. Mine was ok, but I really expected the sponge to be a lot puffier too!

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