Cake!

I made a cake for work.  As most of you have figured out by now, I am completely incapable of making food attractive.  This one turned out to be the ugliest cake I've ever made.  Jenni didn't believe me when I told her so; her exact response was "it can't be THAT bad".

Once she came downstairs and saw it, her response was "OH!  Wow...".  Not in a good way.

It was that bad.  But extremely tasty.

I had a series of problems on this one:

• I have no 8" cake rounds.  The best I've got is 2 mismatched 9"-ish rounds.
• Since the cakes had a larger radius, they ended up fairly short.  They're also mismatched, with one being wider and shorter.
• Like most cakes, you get a mound effect as you bake it, where the center ends up higher than the edges.
• When you make a layer cake, you cut off these mounds so you have a reasonably flat working surface.  Since I needed to cut each of these cakes in two already, I determined that there wasn't going to be enough cake left to bisect if I trimmed it first.  So we end up with two nice flat half cakes and two domes.
• I decided this wouldn't be a big deal if I ended the top layer with one of the domes and mortared the other one with enough frosting to somewhat level it off.  I like frosting.  All the edges have frosting on them too.
• In the process of building the layers, I forgot about my decision in the last step and plopped both domed pieces in the middle layers.
• Since I'm frosting everything as I go, there's no way I can remove a layer.  I determined that this cake will look horrible, shrugged my shoulders, and went back to work.
• I had to mortar up two layers with frosting now, and the topmost dome was sliding around sliding around.
• I finally put the top (flat) layer down and it listed sideways.  I couldn't convince it to straighten up.  And this is the least wide of all the layers, so it looks quite odd perched up there.  Again, shrug shoulders, but this time start giggling.  "Bonjour!  I am un French cake, see, ah have un beret!"
• The recipe called for chilling the cake until the frosting firmed up.  Two hours later, it's still not there and I have to go to bed.  -Shrug-
• I then took the chocolate glaze and started "applying" (i.e., dumping) it to the top layer.  The idea was for it to coat the top and sides and then harden into a shell.  The mismatched layers really didn't let it work that well, and since it wasn't cold enough the chocolate started melting the frosting.
• I had the cake on a cake board and then on a plate, but I hadn't counted on the glaze to pour off the cake in such copious quantities.  Right onto the counter.  You can see a partially cleaned-up version of that below; I wanted to clean it up entirely before taking pictures but Jenni wouldn't let me.
• I had some glaze left over so I thought I'd dump more on it to fill in the holes, but it had hardened up enough that I got ribbons instead.  -Shrug-  Couldn't stop once one was down.  Ribbon time!

The result:

And from another angle:

Again, this was an extremely tasty cake.  And it looked much better by the morning when it all firmed up.

Recipe is here.  My only modification was to use evaporated milk for some of the milk required just so I could use up the can.

The Luke, signing off...