Delicious Disaster

Claire has been very clear about wanting strawberry cake for her birthday cake. I really wanted to make a gunk-free cake (without enriched flour, refined sugar, food dye, etc.) so I decided upon this recipe. It's the only one I find, and looked pretty delicious. I figured I'd make a trial run today knowing that there are a lot of things that can go wrong when baking a cake. Especially since I was changing things up a bit. Good thing, because my house now smells like burning batter. Why you ask?

Is it because I used whole wheat pastry flour instead of white cake flour? Nope
Is it because I don't know how to use an oven? Nope
Is it the use of organic cane sugar instead of refined white sugar? Not a chance

Is it because I failed to notice that pictured cake was three layers and I poured all of my batter into two 8 inch cake pans? BINGO

It looked more like an elementary school volcano experiment than the happenings of a culinary masterpiece in my oven.

And it's really hard to tell whether the burning in you nostrils is coming from the smoking batter on the bottom of the oven, or the overflowing cake pans that have been kept in the oven way longer than the recipe calls for because those darn toothpicks won't come out clean.

So, one of my cakes came out looking like this (after trying to flip it onto the cooling rack).



And the other, though done all the way through and frosted with this little bit of heaven, doesn't look a whole lot better. I guess you could say it has a "great personality".



All is not lost. I ate my fair share of cake pieces and finger-fulls of frosting, and it is darn delicious! I'm thinking strawberry cupcakes for birthday girl.

Speaking of...