A Curseless Cake

I love to make cakes, and will spend time perusing cookbooks for ideas and planning out how I would assemble some of those intricate constructs myself. However, I know from much sad experience that in making a fancy cake something always goes wrong. The caramel burns, using up the last of your sugar. The whipped cream refuses to set up. The layers slide during transit, leaving you with the smashed ruins of a cake upon arrival. The top of the cake bumps the shelf in your fridge, and all your carefully piped decorations stay behind when you take the cake out. You inhale half a pound of powdered sugar in the process of making frosting and give yourself a sugar migraine for the rest of the day.

In particular, I attempted to make a cake at the beginning of September that gave me more than half of the above issues. My kitchen looked like someone had detonated a bomb filled with chocolate shavings in it. It took me forever to get my refrigerator clean again.



Sometimes I can do some fancy substitutions and/or clever renaming and still produce a presentable dessert when the dust settles. This is why I reserve the right to adapt whatever I may have said I would do. I know that changes from the original plan will be in order.

So, when I was asked/volunteered myself to bake a cake for a little informal birthday celebration, I opted to keep it simple and have some back-up plans ready. Because I knew something was going to go wrong.

The first step was to make a cake, which occurred the night before the cake was needed. For this project, it was a chocolate genoise sponge. A sponge cake is drier and contains less butter and sugar then the average American-style mix cake, and I thought it would handle my ministrations without disintegrating into crumbs. The process of making them is a bit more complicated, requiring eggs and sugar to be cooked over a bain marie and then beaten for approximately forever before the rest of the ingredients have to be added without deflating anything. This I for once managed to successfully do.

Also a perk: this recipe makes one deep cake instead of two shallow ones, so I didn't need to juggle hot pans with half-cooked batter around my tiny oven in an attempt to have them cook evenly, nor did I acquire any burns this time around. It baked up into a lovely dome.

. . . which deflated once I took it out of the oven. Well, at least then the top was flat, not domed, and I didn't need to cut off the top part to have a flat surface to frost.

Now, I never manage to frost a cake really smooth, and I don't like to do fancy piping with lots of frosting. I learned a long time ago that sticking candy pieces over the poor frosting job hides just about all flaws. So for this cake, I decided to make chocolate lace. This requires melting chocolate in a little plastic baggy, letting it cool a bit so it isn't so runny, and then drawing triangular-shaped squiggles on a chilled cookie sheet. These are then stuck in the fridge to harden over night.

So, the cake is out of the oven and cooling and the chocolate lace is chilling. I haven't run out of any critical ingredients or burnt anything, and my kitchen counters still look fairly clean. So far, so good.

But the frosting is normally the beast, anyway. One trick to make frosting a cake simpler is to do it in stages, so I opted to put the first layer of frosting on that night. I concocted some buttercream frosting (blend a lot of butter and a splash of vanilla until whipped soft, add powdered sugar until it tastes right and is the right degree of stiffness, add milk in case you need to thin it). I made the frosting pretty thin, so it would be easier to work with. When the cake was cool, I cut it into two layers. What had been the top while the cake baked was flipped upside-down and became the bottom. I edged the layer with my frosting (using a plastic bag as a pastry tube), and then filled the cake with a mixture of strawberry jam and frosting. And then I checked over that wall to make sure it wasn't going to leak anywhere.


Then I put the remaining layer on top and slathered the entire thing with frosting. The goal was to seal in the sides and crumbs, not to be pretty or to cover everything.


The cake layers didn't break, I didn't run out of butter, there is no jam oozing down the sides, the layers aren't sliding around, the frosting hadn't ripped any part of the cake . . . this had gone remarkably well. The cake went into the fridge to set, and I went to bed to alleviate the sugar head-ache.

It still looked good the next morning. I mixed up some more frosting, adding a little thinned strawberry jam to turn it slightly pink, and frosted the whole thing. Then I peeled my chocolate lace pieces off the tin-foil and stuck them on the sides. Not one of them broke. For the first time ever, I was looking at a cake that more or less matched my plans. Also for the first time ever, my kitchen didn't look like a war-zone after the process.


So it is going to die in transit. This seemed assured by two facts. One, I had to carry it on the bus, and two, I didn't have a large enough box to transport it in. I ended up covering the cake with tin-foil after the frosting had crusted and holding it the entire way. My right wrist was ready to mutiny by the time I got there.

But lo and behold, the cake arrived with no noticeable change in appearance, was cut into reasonably neat slices, and was entirely eaten up by the end of the evening.

I think I have turned a corner.