A Cake story

I was really excited about making Mark's birthday cake...so excited, that I failed to read the instructions all the way through. I was trying to follow a recipe, but make some changes (i.e. change cherries for strawberries, and cheesecake frosting instead of homemade whipped frosting) at the same time. I knew that it involved making two different cakes, so we bought two different cakes. This is more or less what I was striving for...

HAHAHAHAHA...everything was going great, I made the cake batters and started pouring them into my 9 inch cake pans. I began to notice around this time, that something wasn't quite right, as the batter filled clear up to the rim of the pan. I figured that the cakes must not rise much. I mean, I've made cakes before in retangular pans and never had a problem, and I had read the instructions and saw that you could use 9" cake pans.

So into the oven the cakes go. I start smelling the cakes right away, and take a peek inside. I think I shut the oven door quicker than I opened it, trying to close away the horror that I saw. The cake pans were overflowing and spilling to the bottom of the stove. I couldn't figure it out and then I realized that I must have used "pie pans" and not "cake pans". Of course! That makes sense. The burning smell started roaming throughout the house, and knowing that there would soon be a fire following, I had my mom help me scrape the collected cake from the bottom of the stove. I have never seen something smoke so much! It's a good thing that I didn't go off and leave the cakes cooking, or I would have come home to an ignited stove. I was soooo sad, my perfect cake was now a disater. How could I salvage such a monstrosity?

I went back to reading the box instructions, to figure out what I had missed. AHA!!! Turns out that ONE box of cake mix, makes TWO 9 inch cakes. I used TWO boxes for TWO cake pans. No wonder why they were filled so high. What should have taken 30 minutes to bake, took nearly an hour, and I was sweating it thinking that the cake themselves would burn in that time.

The time came to take the cakes out of the oven. Thankfully, they weren't as bad off as I feared. I dumped the cakes out onto another plate, and trimmed the bad stuff off of them. Then I spent a couple of hours preparing the strawberry sauces, and the creamcheese frosting, and finally putting the cake together. This was my final result....

I was really scared because the layers kept wanting to slide off because of the strawberry sauce. A toppling cake wouldn't have been cool. Lol. But it withstood all the weight (a HEAVY cake) and both Mark and I agreed that it was one of the best tasting cakes we've ever had. My brother doesn't like sweets like cakes, cookies, etc, and he ate a big ol peice of it. :) I have a newfound respect for bakers who make their cakes look so beautiful. It is not an easy thing to do!!!!