Man vs Cakes

Well, I promised drama in this wedding "Cake Week", and now I'm starting to wish I hadn't. I wish I had said something like, "Wedding cakes are a very simple process and are usually baked and assembled in a very calm and easy manner where nothing goes wrong." As it were, I have been a total self-fulfilling prophecy.

Today I finally began baking the brazillion sheet cakes I need for the weekend. Mind you, sheet cakes are not something that need to be left to the pastry chefs or even the especially talented baker. They are just sheet cakes- cakes that are baked on sheet pans. Somehow today these sheet cakes did not go very well- and when I say not go very well it is an understatement, but the words that would most accurately describe my time I do not use because they are not befitting of a lady.

See, what happened was this: today I discovered that MY OVEN IS SLANTED!!!!!!!!! How in the !#$#%#^%$ it took me this long to notice I do not know. I guess I just havent made very many kinds of dishes that exaggerated the angle. Well, the chocolate cake batter I used is delicious, but very liquidy before being baked. Soooo the first two sheets of chocolate cake ended up paper thin on one side and way thick on the other. I supposed I could have ran with it and made some awesome sculptural wedding cake, but I really just want squares- not triangles.

So I cleaned everything up, washed out my mixing bowl and set out to begin again with the intention of giving all my sheet pans a 1/4 turn to make the slant a little less *$#@#@$#. Good news: it worked well enough. Bad News: when I set out to mix another chocolate cake I ran out of flour AND vanilla AND cocoa powder AND milk AND lemons all at the same time. I guess I just didn't notice my supplies of all of the above dwindling at the exact same rate.

Anyhoo, it was getting close to "throwing the cake against the wall" time all too soon. I hadn't even begun decorating! So, I took a deep breath and embraced the opportunity to go on a windows down summer evening drive to the grocery store while listening to bluegrass on a local radio station. I came back, sucessfully made 4 beautiful sheets of vanilla cake and some lemon curd and called it a day.

Now I'm going to try my hand at my prophetic skills again....There's no need to even read my blog anymore this week. This wedding cake is going to be sooo easy and perfect and go so well that I'm not even going to have anything else to write about.

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