Let them eat cake?

We have a church potluck picnic this evening and I have been trying to plan what to make.


I saw a recipe for a two-layer chocolate cake with mocha icing. The pictures looked yummy and as I perused the ingredients I was delighted to discover I had them all.


I've had a stressful couple of days and thought getting lost in a recipe would do my mind good. As I mixed and measured and poured, I was encouraged by the smells and consistency of the batter. This is going to be great I kept thinking over and over.


My husband even commented on how delicious the batter tasted as he licked the paddle.


I poured the batter into the pans and popped it into the oven.


I moved on to creating the icing and thought of how pretty the confectioner's sugar looked as I sifted it. My mind traveled back to watching my Grandmother sift flour and I smiled from the memory.


I looked at the mixture in the bowl and thought that it looked too dry. A quick study of the recipe proved that I had misread one of the ingredients and was getting ready to really ruin my icing. The recipe called for 7 T. of strong coffee and I almost added 7T. of ground coffee not prepared, thankfully I had not added that yet.


I googled how to make coffee without a pot and made some and added it to the icing. It looked wonderful and smelled amazing!


Then I started to smell smoke...


I opened the oven door to discover that the pans were overflowing with chocolate cake batter onto my newly scrubbed (and I do mean scrubbed) oven. I whimpered at the thoughts of cleaning the oven again.


Later on, the timer beeped letting me know the cakes were done. They weren't perfect, but they were manageable.

I let them cool on the counter.

Now the fun part, I thought!

I popped out one of the cakes and applied icing to the top. The icing was a bit difficult to work with but it was not too bad. Then I added the other cake on top of that and attempted to ice that one.

It began to crumble, then one side fell apart.

It's so ugly!

Yet, it tastes heavenly!

I'm going to make something else for the picnic this evening...

My husband has claimed the ugly cake for himself :)