The Worst Cake I’ve Ever Made

My baby girl turned one last month. She’s my third. We already have everything a one year old could possibly need. And we were about to be moving. So, I didn’t get her a birthday present. And there was a pandemic going on. So, I didn’t throw her a birthday party. I felt kind of guilty about it, because I got my other kids First Birthday Presents, and hosted First Birthday Parties for each of them. But, such is the nature of Baby #3 having her First Birthday in 2020.

I calmed my conscience about it with the intention of making her a cute and delicious First Birthday Cake. Miryam and Luke kept asking about Cecily’s party, and I kept explaining that there would be no big party—“because of the coronavirus”—and reminding them that a special celebration with her immediate family would make Cecily just as happy. “The cake is the party,” I kept telling the kids. “The cake will be the gift,” I kept telling myself.

So, I chose an ages-ago-pinned recipe from my Pinterest board called sweets ’n’ treats for a pink almond cake. She’s a girl, so the pink would be nice, and I personally love almond-flavored desserts, especially if chocolate is off the table. Justin doesn’t like chocolate. Since we weren’t going to have any party guests to help eat the cake, I needed to pick a flavor Justin would partake of. Pink almond cake, then.

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In the name of having the best possible cake, I had planned leftovers for dinner, so I could focus on cake-baking and have fresh cake on Cecily’s birthday. Well, that backfired a bit when I realized I had failed to take inventory of the pantry before beginning. Only after measuring out dry ingredients and eggs did I realize I barely had enough almond extract to make the cake batter. There was none left for the frosting. Justin was at work. I was not about to drag three children to the grocery store for one thing. My trusty neighbors on one side didn’t have any almond extract, and the ones on the other side weren’t home. Almond cake with vanilla frosting, then.

Most of the cakes I’ve ever made have been made by the “creaming method,” in which slightly softened butter is beaten with sugar as the very first step. The sugar smacking into the butter over and over creates lots of tiny air bubbles, which the baking powder and heat from the oven cause to expand, giving the cake “lift” and a nice texture. I went about measuring my ingredients as though I would be creaming butter and sugar first: butter in the mixer bowl softening, sugar in its own bowl ready to join the butter, dry ingredients in another bowl to be whisked a bit before going into the mixer, and eggs, extracts, and milk on standby.

Then I read the recipe’s instructions.

It said to mix the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, salt) and the sugar with the butter all at the same time. Then separately mix the milk, vanilla/almond and eggs together, and add that to the mixer. Mix and pour and bake.

I was skeptical of this method. I’d never made a cake with that order of ingredient mixing before. I hesitated to follow the recipe. Maybe I should combine these ingredients with my own regular mixing method. But the Rule Follower in me rationalized that maybe the mixing method necessitated the amount of baking powder (that amount did seem a bit excessive to me), which I’d already measured with no turning back, so, Okay. I’ll use this blog lady’s mixing methodology. I dumped the bowl of dry ingredients into the mixer bowl with the butter and proceeded from there.

Except…

Well, when I got it all mixed up (or so I thought), it seemed awfully thin. As I was about to pour the batter into the pans, I licked a stray drop off my finger. It tasted odd….not sweet.

The sugar! Was still! In its own bowl! Behind where the dry ingredients bowl had been. So, it got mixed in very last, instead of very first. The sugar didn’t get a chance to smack air bubbles into the butter before being introduced to wet ingredients where it would readily dissolve, meaning I wouldn’t get quite the rise I should have from the batter. The sugar didn’t get a chance to dissolve in some of the water from the eggs and butter, which would have kept that water from being available to the glutenin and gliadin in the flour (which is usually added very last in my regular method), meaning the flour got all the water it wanted to form lots of gluten. And I had to “mix until combined” a second time, meaning the flour wasn’t “just mixed” with the wet ingredients, but rather double-mixed….likely overmixed, meaning even more gluten; in other words: this cake was not going to be as light and fluffy as it should have been. Face. Palm.

Have I mentioned that Cecily’s birthday fell during the time our house was listed on the MLS? Well, it did. And someone had requested a showing for the time window during which I had been planning to get the cake baked. So, I put off the cake till later, loaded up the kids, and took them to a park in the sweltering August heat. Toward the end of the requested showing window, the showing was canceled. Seriously? Do you know what a pain it is to get the house perfect and my kids out the door? And then you cancel? So I’d already been through that frustration when I had the cake mixing fiasco.

Anyway, I divided the batter between the pans and popped them into the oven. To my surprise, honestly, they looked fine when they came out! They rose, they were pink, they smelled good.

That is, until I inverted them out of their pans.

I put parchment paper circles into the bottoms of the pans to ensure the cake wouldn’t stick to the pan. But the batter was so thin that it filled in around up under the parchment paper, so half the parchment paper was actually inside the cake by between a millimeter and half an inch all around the bottom edge. I had non-stick-sprayed the pan both before and after adding the parchment circles, so luckily the cake still came out of the pan easily, but I had to surgically remove the parchment paper from each cake’s interior, and the part of the cake that had cooked underneath the paper had the texture of an overcooked omelette—SO rubbery.

I chose to save myself from having to shave the rest of the bottom off each cake round, in order to have flat surfaces for stacking and frosting, by opting to leave the rubber edges where they lay. That, too, was a mistake, made especially clear after the cake had been refrigerated as leftovers. It was downright unpleasant to have a bite of. Oddly, though, that was Miryam’s favorite part: the pink rubber omelette pancake of sorts. 🤔 

As soon as the cakes were all cooled, I whipped up the frosting and got cracking on the assembly. I had made two layers each of 9-inch and 6-inch rounds, so that Cecily could have a smash cake, and the rest of us could have a slice of the big cake. That part did go to plan. Once the frosting was on and they were plated, you wouldn’t have known the drama that went into their insides. The absolute best thing about these cakes was how they looked. Because, without any almond extract to put in the frosting, its plain vanilla pinkness was way too sweet, even for me, even after the generous pinches of salt I added, in defiance of the recipe. Like, it gives me a toothache just remembering it. Justin couldn’t eat more than half his slice and never went back for leftovers. Perhaps I should have just made a chocolate cake!

This cake was the only dessert (of SO MANY) I ever shared with neighbors that they never texted about afterward to tell me they loved it. This was the only cake that has ever sat in our fridge, leftover, uncoveted, for so long. This was the only cake I’ve made that hands-down looked better than it tasted—usually I care more about the taste than the appearance, as I like things to look homemade—well, except the gluten-free layers of Miryam’s Fourth Birthday Cake, but that’s another story.

However, I have a knack for finding silver linings. So, at least this cake wasn’t for an audience. No one else had to witness nor suffer through the disaster, and I was spared the embarrassment of serving it to guests. I warned my neighbors that this was “definitely not my best cake” when I brought them a few pieces. At least they haven’t sent me a dentist’s bill to reimburse them for. And, at least I didn’t need to blink twice about throwing the rest of the smashed smash cake into the trash when Cecily was finished with it.

And like I told my big kids when they repeatedly asked about the caliber of the celebration: it made dear Cecily just as happy to have this cake as any other. Hey, I can only go up from here for her birthday cakes!

And now, a montage of the sugary baby for your enjoyment:

Tell me about a kitchen fail you’ve had, in the comments below!