Happy Birthday!

Lil' Patch o' Internet was born one year ago today! It started out featuring the crazy rantings of a pregnant woman who couldn't get a bratwurst microwaved in the middle of the night and now discusses the roller coaster that is motherhood!

Incidentally, that cake pictured is not for my blog, my mom's birthday happens to be today too. But it makes for a nice segue into today's post.

I like making 'improved' cake box cakes. I get them out of this book called 'The Cake Doctor'. The recipes use a regular box cake for a base, but then add various ingredients and homemade touches for very yummy cakes. Since I've started making homemade frosting, I can't stand the canned stuff, it's way too sweet. Anyway, I typically make sheet cakes or bundt* cakes. Then every once in a while I'll tackle a two tier round cake. And then remember why I never make two tier round cakes. I have the world's worst problem icing them. I don't know why either. Most of them have some sort of filling between the layers, which acts as a lubricant. The cake then slides this way and that while I'm icing it. This particular cake has a cherry filling, which I cheated on. The directions were to get whole cherries and basically make cherry pie filling. I just bought cherry pie filling. The author of this book evidently did not know that I would have a child screaming at me while I was baking. Anyway, so the cherries were meant to stay in the MIDDLE of the cake. If you look at the cake, you can clearly see that they are everywhere! They oozed out the sides and into the icing, and then all over the cake. The other problem that I had, was that the frosting just seemed to slide down the side of the damn cake. The butter-cream may have gotten too warm, or may have been a bit too heavy on the milk.** After ten minutes of grappling with it, with Doug screaming at the baby gate, I was ready to throw in the towel. By this point Jeff had finally finished up his project and was able to come and see what both Doug and I were screaming about. After an initial assessment, Jeff decided that he could fix the cake:

(I married an engineer who is a perfectionist. Occasionally it pays off :)

You have to admit, the cake looks much better. Unless anyone is willing to teach me the art of frosting, from now on I'll stick to bundts, sheet cakes and cheesecakes :)



*Does anyone else flash back to that scene in 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding' about the bundt cake? Makes me laugh every time. And then I spent a week saying 'Bund-T!'. But I digest.

**Not pictured here is the kitchen counter, which is covered in confectioner's sugar. I used a bigger bowl than normal to avoid the mushroom cloud of sugar, but the bigger bowl made more of a mess some how. To the side there is a sad tomato that has a lovely dusting of sugar now. Anyway, the ratio of sugar to milk were probably rather significantly off.