Failed Cakes, High School, and Other Disasters.

So, my oldest daughter is officially a middle school graduate.

Don't ask me how that happened.  One minute I was this nervous expectant mother in my early twenties, unsure of what the future held, terrified of what it would mean to be a mom.

These days, I'm only slightly less terrified.

But somehow, we made it.  Through preschool, kindergarten, elementary school, and now--middle school.  The middle school days are over.

To celebrate, I baked a cake.

Now, one thing you should know about me before reading on:  I do enjoy experimenting in the kitchen, but baking is not my forte.  I make the world's best chocolate chip cookies--they're huge and soft and chewy and ohmyword delicious.  But that's all I got.

Still, this cake came in a box, so I figured it couldn't be that hard.  I read the directions.  I mixed the batter.  I baked the cake.

My daughter arrived about halfway through the process to tell me I was doing it wrong.  I showed her that I was, indeed, following the directions, and I pointed to the part on the box that gave specific instructions for using a glass baking pan, which is what I was doing.

I'm still not sure what exactly went wrong.  It may have been, as Kaliah claimed, the pan, which was square, but had slightly angled sides.  It may have been, as my mother supposes, that I used only one pan instead of creating layers (nowhere on the directions, by the way, does it claim that this is a hazard).  But here's what happened:

The timer went off.  I removed the cake from the oven.  I stuck the toothpick in and it came out clear.  I left the cake to cool.

After waiting the recommended time (fifteen minutes), I dumped the cake out of the pan and onto a cookie sheet to ice it.  Before I saw the problem, I first heard "uh-oh" from my husband, who was observing.

Turns out, the cake had not baked all the way through, despite the misleading toothpick stick.  So, the edges of the cake were done, but approximately half of the project, the half that was buried beneath the golden brown exterior, was still in a soup-like-form, and I ended up dumping a half-baked, half-battered conglomeration of gunk onto the cookie sheet.  The sea of batter spilled over that of the cake which was formed, as I gazed on in amazement.

So, what now?  I did what any good baker would do. I scooped the entire mess back into the pan and threw it back into the oven, checking it every ten minutes.

Now, I did have plans that day, plans which did not allow for an extra hour of baking time for a half-finished cake.  So at some point, I removed the cake from the oven, pressed FIRMLY on the previously undone portion with my finger to make sure it had actually turned from a liquid to solid this time, and then threw the whole mess into the refrigerator. 

In the meantime, in typical high-schooler fashion, my daughter came out to laugh at me, declared that she would not be eating any of the cake (indeed, pleaded with me not to "make her"), and then proceeded to consume some of the icing straight out of the can.

The following day, I yanked everything out of the fridge to try again, including the icing my daughter had opened.  I ruthlessly scraped all of the cake out of the pan, spatula style, mashing it down into a sort-of-square as I remolded it into a not even kind of pleasing shape.  I then slathered it with icing, which of course, was not easy to spread, as both cake and topping were cold.  Bits of cake crumbs were spreading along with the icing.  Other portions of the cake were crumbling beneath my attempts to cover it in frosting.  My three-year-old arrived to look on eagerly, stroking my arm and restoring my ego as she breathed, "Oooh!  It's so beautiful!"

Mind you, this cake was the opposite of beautiful.  This was the most unbeautiful cake that ever was.

But my sweet Shay continued to look on in awe, exclaiming, "It's so beautiful!  And you're so gorgeous!"

And at that point, I couldn't help but laugh until I was crying.  Because in my head, I still had the vision of yesterday, when the goop of uncooked batter was splattering all over the broken pile of baked cake as I stared on in horror.

But today, Shay saw only a beautiful cake.

So we continued to cover it in chunky cool frosting, and then I let Shay shower it with blue sprinkles in an attempt to further beautify my disaster.

Despite the less than smooth path to creation, it ended up tasting a-okay.

Even Kaliah said so.  And no, I did not force her to eat it.