Cake-tastrophy

Last week I made a decadent chocolate butter cake with strawberry filling and real buttercream icing using the recipes from “The Whimsical Bakehouse” book. I was very excited because the house buttercream from the Whimsical Bakehouse really will change your life. The lightness and balance between creamy and sweet is wonderful.

I iced it as a standard layer cake even though the architectural feats of the WB cakes look and sound very approachable on the pages. Off to the Delaware beaches we went. When we arrived- CAKE-TASTROPHY! The top layer slid right off the bottom and smooshed itself up against the side of the carrier. Whoops. What went wrong? Did the buttercream warm up to a slippery goo and undermined the integrity of the layers? Did the tall layers of cake require wooden doweling to hold together on the long journey? Was the traffic on 295 too much for the previously sheltered cake to bear? We may never know.

But the show must go on! We have birthdays to celebrate and yumminess to devour. With a small spatula, my nimble assistant Kate and I were able to lift the top layer and re-form the basic cake structure. We then scraped off the remnants of pink swags, green scroll work, and white daises from the sides of the cake and restored the snow white base coating. The next step was to re-create a pink-tinted tie dye of colored icing on the vertical sides. By re-piping some of the colored icing into a message on the top and sticking on some well-placed sugar sprinkle flowers we created a whole new design that would have made MacGyver proud.

My one regret is that my camera batteries died and in all of the excitement I did not get a photo of the Franken-cake at any stage to share with you. However, we DID get to honor a wonderful woman’s birthday with candles, chocolate, and song. And THAT is what this is all about.

There is a good lesson here. You can’t control everything, but it is what is underneath that counts. With a little ingenuity, creativity, and grace you come away with a few extra laughs at the party.