The Cake that Almost Wasn't

I wish that everything that came out of my kitchen looked as good as this......

Dulce de Leche Cheesecake Squares

Or these.......

Mint Chocolate Chip Cupcakes

Or this.

Chocolate Overdose Cake

But that's just not always the case.

Ta da!  

I present to you the cake I made to celebrate my dad's birthday.

I thought about giving my 6-year old the credit for that beauty......

but no, it was all my doing.

See, it was supposed to turn out like this.  Raspberry Chocolate Cake.   It's what Dad picked.  

A lovely, delicious cake.

Except that due to a significant error, it went so. so. wrong.

See, the filling involves cooking some flour and milk on the stovetop until it's thick, and then letting it cool before mixing it in with butter and powdered sugar. 

I got all in a hurry and mixed it in while it was still warm. 

As I was putting the top layer of cake on, I noticed that the bottom layer of filling was oozing out.  Big time.

I kept scraping it up and trying to shove it back in.....to no avail.  Then the second layer started oozing.  

Oh boy.

I ended up taking the cake apart, scraping off the filling, adding some more powdered sugar, and chilling it for at least an hour to help it firm up.

Then I assembled the cake again.....but it just kept happening.  Somewhere in there, the notion popped into my head that if I could just get the frosting on, it would "seal in" the filling  So I whipped up the frosting and hurriedly scooped it on there.

But the cake layers just kept sliding, the filling was continually oozing, and it was getting messier by the second.  

It gets even worse.

I remembered the trick of using drinking straws (cut) to hold cake layers together, so I stuck a couple of those in the cake also, in the vain hope that the layers would just.stay.in.place.

Nope.

And as the cake split around the straws, it made a gigantic crater.  Grand Canyon Cake, as Grant called it.

With no idea what to do next, I just put the cake dome over it all and refrigerated it for a couple of hours, knowing that at least with the dome on there, the cake couldn't slide off the cake stand.

So when it came time to serve the cake and I removed the dome, of course the side that had slid over was completely stuck to the glass and there was no way to avoid taking a huge chunk out of the side of the cake.  

Nice.

Thankfully, my dad is a great sport and thoroughly enjoyed the mess of a cake anyways. 

 It did taste good.