My own personal cake wreck.

Kenny's birthday is today (happy birthday, Kenny!) so some time in the last week or so I got the brilliant idea to make him a cake. A layer cake. With homemade icing and coconut. It seemed like an average sort of goal because idiots make cake all the time, right? Hell, if idiots can do it, so can I!

I am here to tell you that baking is FOR SUCKERS. Man, I am good at a lot of things but baking is not one of them.

Initially I was very proud of myself for remembering to call and ask Kenny to take the butter out to soften. By the time i got home it was REAL SOFT. Maybe too soft. Whatever. I should also mention I got home after 8pm, having met some friends for an early dinner. So, really, this was panic-baking at it's finest. Nothing like sobbing in a cloud of flour on the sticky kitchen floor at 10:30PM. Okay, that didn't really happen, but I was certainly not calm. I made the following rookie mistakes:

• Realized halfway through that my flour was of the "better for bread" variety.
• Didn't read the recipe in advance and was flailingly desperate in my attempts to "completely cool" the cocoa/boiling water mixture. Kenny helped.
• My attempt to not over-mix the batter (PER DIRECTIONS) resulted in some very obvious butter lumps. Great for biscuits! If I were making biscuits.
• I made the frosting from a totally different recipe that, um, wasn't a layer cake. Do you know how much frosting you need for a layer cake? A LOT MORE THAN I MADE, that's how much.
• I set the timer for the time the recipe indicated and when it went off I pulled the cake out to cool. Yes, that's right, I didn't test them for done-ness. LOST was on! I didn't have time for that.
• LOST was on.

When I pulled the cakes out they looked okay, but ten minutes later they'd all fallen. Oops. I removed them from the pans to cool further and when I started to assemble one of them completely buckled in the middle. I did a quick flip-slap and made it the center layer, filling in the huge dip with frosting (which might explain where it all went.) The final layer had a surprise chocolate-lava center, so yeah, it's probably half raw. Or "not dry" if you want to be all glass-half-full about it. Oy.

Kenny came it to watch me attempt to frost the monstrosity and we both laughed hysterically because, dude:


I ran out of frosting, obviously, so I tried to doctor it up with some shredded coconut:



It's got a nice lean to it and weighs about 80 pounds. That's not worrisome at all, right?

PS. I know I've been a pest about this, but if you haven't already, please vote for my friend's baby Lulu! This is the final day and she's lost her lead:

http://www.babble.com/impossibly-cute/fan-favorite/index.aspx

You don't have to register or anything, just get clicky!

Releasing the Kraken.

I've spent most of this week under a cloud, a dark cloud created by hormones and a specific pre-condition condition that I forget about every month until I'm in it. In it to win it, y'all, with my nameless rage at I don't even know what. Everything, I guess. Rage against my car, the potholes, my fluctuating weight, my inability to not eat things I'm not supposed to eat, at the cat for hocking a hairball on the rug we haven't even owned a week, emails I can't answer fast enough, flaky eBay sellers, flaky riding instructors, beautiful days that I feel like I"m missing, all of it. Rage.

But then this morning I woke up and the cloud had blown over and the day was new and sparkly with weekend-to-come promise. If I were a religious person I'd say today was a gift from God, but I'm not, so lets just say the day felt like a gift in general. As I drove across the bridge to work I enjoyed the view and was grateful to be part of it all, to have woken up and still be in the world no matter how weird and messy it is.

So, there. A mostly non-snarky entry from me. Also, my outfit is cute today if you were wondering.

Have a good weekend!