Ugly Cake

Otherwise known as a culinary "don't," this was my contribution to our big family party today:






















Lovely, isn't it? That's OK. I know it's atrocious. You can laugh. But you can't have any. Despite it's appearance it was quite tasty, so I'm not sharing the leftovers.

So how did this cake go so horribly wrong?

Well, really, the cake itself is not to blame, but as seems to often be the case, it was the glaze that did me in. (If you don't believe me about this being where cakes often go wrong, you really should check out Cake Wrecks, a blog that I read for fun.)

As the cake baked, I whipped up the the 3-ingredient glaze according to instructions. Only it was white, and I thought it would be oh-so-much more lovely if it was yellow, since the cake is lemon. In my mind I imagined my cake would be just as tasty and even more beautiful than the to-die-for lemon cake from C*stco.

So I got out the food coloring paste, only I forgot how potent that stuff was, and my glaze suddenly became a color only a preschooler could love. No problem. Recipes never have enough frosting anyway, so I decided I would just double glaze and not add any more food coloring. Well, obviously that didn't really solve my problem. Too late now. I was out of lemon juice, so couldn't attempt a third batch of glaze.

The cake finally came out of the oven, and only broke a little when I turned it out of the bundt pan. No biggie, that's what the glaze is for, to cover up the little dents in the cake. Yeah, right. This glaze being on the thin side, it hid nothing and instead magnified the dents. And it started hardening kind of quickly, effecting the gloppy clumpy look. At one point the center of the bundt was filled with glaze (remember, double batch?) and I scooped it out with a gravy ladle to drown the outer visible portion of the cake.

Like I said, at least it tasted good. Let's just hope this is not representative of what's to come in 2009.
-- Originally posted at: http://rebeccasmiscellanies.blogspot.com/