Friday, March 8, 2013

Recipe FAIL- Dr. Seuss Disaster Cake

Last Saturday was Dr. Seuss's birthday, and I thought it would be fun to make a crazy cake to celebrate.  (plus, I've been having cake withdrawals since I went off dairy and I wanted to try making dairy free frosting...)

Turns out, some brands and flavors of boxed cake mixes are dairy free, so I thought I'd just use one of those, and focus my experimental energy on the frosting.  I used a Western Family yellow cake mix, and after mixing it all together, separated it into 3 bowls and dyed one reddish-orange, dyed one green, and one blue (leaving the original yellow color in the mixing bowl).  Then I poured the yellow and red into one 6" cake pan, and the blue and green into the other.  I thought using 6" cake pan would make it extra tall and funny-looking... kinda Dr. Seussy, right?

Le Sigh.

I guess I didn't Pam & flour my pans well enough because neither one came out very cleanly, and almost ALL of the yellow part of the yellow/red cake got stuck in.  Oh well, I thought.  Nothing a little frosting couldn't fix, right?

On to the frosting...  I should preface this with the fact that I never use a recipe when I make butter cream frosting... Just a stick of butter, at room temp, a smidge of milk, a tich of vanilla, and add powdered sugar until the consistency is good.  easy peasy.  So I thought I'd do the same, but sub all the dairy ingredients for non-dairy ones.

Long story short, I used a combination of coconut cream and Earth Balance Soy Spread, instead of butter (but the soy spread was not at room temp...) and I think I accidentally added too much coconut milk.  I could NOT get the frosting to have a thick enough consistency and had to add way too much powdered sugar.  The frosting tasted almost like pure sugar and so I stopped.

I started frosting the cake (which was ever so slightly still warm. BIG mistake) and it soon became obvious that the cake with a large chunk missing from its bottom was not going to stay put!  The frosting acted like more of a lubricant and the two layers were just sliding all over the place.  I decided to stick some BBQ skewers into the two layers to hold them in place, and put the cake in the cold garage to set-up before I finished frosting it.  Next time I went to check on the cake, it looked like this.
 Oh well.  I tried to cut up a piece as nice as I could so I could get a feel for what it WOULD have looked like had I not been so impatient and used a recipe for frosting.
It did taste ok, but the frosting was too sweet for Jay and I.  I have never failed so miserably on a cake before.  (except maybe that time I tried angel food cake 3 times and it fell apart while cooling all. 3. times.)

3 comments:

Keegan said...

I don' know: I still think it has fun Dr. Suess-like character. Not a real failure after all. However, I now expect a quirky rhyming poem about the experience. ;)

Lindsay said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Lindsay said...

Haha. I'm glad I'm not the only one who had a cake disaster recently (not sure if you saw my cake tipping over incident on FB). Anyway, you should try whipped coconut cream for your desserts if you haven't already. So yummy!