Sometimes baking doesn't go so smoothly

While I remember anticipating the opportunity to decorate sugar cookies at Christmas, it's actually rather surprising that cake decorating has become one of my favourite hobbies.  I learned to love baking from both my mom and grandma.  Childhood memories abound that include making dozens of cookies with my mom (she didn't believe in making single batches or even only one kind of cookie at a time!) or baking rolls and other goodies with my grandma when I was stuck at home with the chicken pox.  But, my first attempt at baking and decorating a cake on my own was less than successful.  I was maybe eight years old when I decided I was going to bake my mom's birthday cake.  It was going to be a white cake and it was going to have blue frosting because that was her favourite colour.

Cake #1 turned out rather, well, flat.  Baking powder is apparently a critical ingredient and I'd left it out.  My dad encouraged me to start again and my brother happily helped eat the evidence of the tasty but flat cake.  Cake # 2 had all the right ingredients but things didn't go smoothly with the decorating part.  I'd used my mom's butter frosting recipe, but substituted margarine instead of butter. At eight, I clearly didn't have a great understanding of how colours mixed together and my theory that adding more blue would eventually make the icing, well, more blue was flawed by the rather yellow base that I was working with thanks to the margarine.  Bright turquoise might be a better description of the end colour.  I was heartbroken as I iced the cake, because it just wasn't right.  My dad suggested we could add coconut to the outside of the cake.  A great idea when the frosting is white, and it did definitely help cover some of the blue.  Only one problem, if you imagine the cake (I don't know if pictures of that one exist), the picture you can see in your mind of a greeny-blue and fuzzy cake is probably just about right.  That's not a description that food should ever have!  My mom is a gracious woman and she ate her birthday cake without any hesitation.  Along the way, I learned some important lessons about paying attention to the recipe and that more isn't always better. 

Even now though, sometimes Murphy's Law can take over in the kitchen.  When making a birthday cake for a friend a few years ago, I wasn't sure the cake would ever be finished.  The day had started out with making fudge for a church bake sale.  In the close to 25 years I've been making that recipe, I've only messed up it up twice.  That was the second time. Strike 1.  When it was time to bake the cake, I managed to drop the flour canister on the floor.  Flour creates a rather beautiful volcano effect when it hits the floor in a hard plastic container.  Strike 2.  To top off the day of kitchen disasters, I managed to drop the Corning Ware baking dish and cake when I was turning the cake onto the cooling rack.  Glass fragments are not a good addition to a cake.  Strike 3. 



If I ever find pictures of either of the fuzzy blue cakes,
I'll be sure to add them.  For now your imaginations
will have to provide those pictures. =)

 After I bought a new cake pan (which is now one of my favourites to use), I restarted the cake baking the next day, and thankfully, with the help of Murphy staying home and having some leftover royal icing morning glories and trilliums from the Wilton class I'd recently finished, the cake was finished just in time and no further disasters happened on the way! 

Best lesson learned, even the disasters can be really funny later on.  Not that long ago, we actually decided it would be funny to recreate the crazy fuzzy blue cake for my mom's birthday ... just because we could.  It's part of our family stories, but I have to wonder if we'd still remember that specific birthday celebration if the cake had turned out perfectly.