It's the Spazz's birthday tomorrow and I have no idea what to get him so I decided to bake a cake. This is worth at least one hundred dollars in my time (not including my blogging time), so I think it's a pretty substantial gift. I just hope he is not expecting perfection (he's not even expecting a cake, so I'm already ahead of the game).
But, as most of you know, the kitchen is foreign territory to me, despite the fact that it is actually only about 10 feet away from the couch, which is where I spend most of my time surfing the net and watching bad TV. It is also where I battle the cat for precious ass-spreading space, but that's another story. Suffice it to say, if the couch is California, the kitchen is a Pacific Island.
My first step was to find a recipe. I have a stash of cookbooks in my kitchen, most of which were given to me by my mother (who is also not known for her culinary expertise) and after looking through two of them, I opted for an internet search.
The internet yielded the following information: The Giant Dwarf is too lazy and too cooking-disabled to bake a cake from scratch. The Giant Dwarf also doesn't bake enough to buy baking dry goods as evidenced by the bag of flour in the cupboard with a sell-by date of November 2002.
So off to Ralph's I went. I stared at the instant cake mix shelf for a very long time. I decided that my man deserved nothing but the best so I bought the Betty Crocker Decadent Supreme Cake Mix in the flavor of "Chocolate Mousse." This INCLUDED the chocolate mousse "topping" that I would otherwise not even care about. The cake was enough of a challenge, let alone having to pick out icing.
As it turned out, I needed no other ingredients. I had water, eggs, butter and milk (I know, it was a banner day), so I was set.
Here is what went wrong:
(1) I used the wrong sized bowl. The powder fit in the bowl just fine, but the rest of the ingredients topped it off and then when I was stirring, bits of the powder were flying around my kitchen. The one I don't use so it is usually pristine-clean.
(2) Is every kitchen supposed to have an electric mixer? I wasn't aware that this was a Betty Crocker rule. I figured I can just stir the mix with my trusty wooden spoon and my massive biceps, the latter of which I obtained while sitting on the couch and internet-surfing.
(3) I switched to blender. Blenders don't work like mixers. This is my public service announcement.
(4) A few of the girls were over this afternoon and one of them suggested that I use a heart-shaped mold for the cake batter (thank you, Nicole). This was an awesome idea, except that there was more cake batter than pan, so I had to use a second pan in a different shape. No matter. I'd have TWO cakes, which is always better than one (unless you are on a diet or have already eaten enough sweets today to last the rest of the month). I poured the batter into the heart-shaped pan to the top, then filled the square pan about 1/2 inch up. I put them in the oven.
(5) It occurred to me in about one minute that the heart-shaped pan should NOT be filled to the rim. I pulled the two pans out of the oven and evened them out. At least I thought I did. I let them bake for a bit over 30 minutes et voila! the heart-shaped cake had grown what appeared to be a second organ which was pouring over the rim. The square pan basically was in the shape of a pyramid.
Well, I did learn something somewhere once, so I took a knife and scraped off the growth at the bottom of the heart cake. This was a golden opportunity, as it turned out, for me to taste the cake (a few times) and it was good. I flipped it upside down and it really worked!
Next was the mousse topping: this I actually did mix by hand, despite Betty's instruction to use a mixer, and this time resulted in a nice smooth mousse-like concoction. Have any of you ever iced a cake before? I have always been in awe of cake-icers because it looks so Zen.
It is not Zen.
It is a fucking nightmare.
But I somehow managed to fully ice the cake, using my fingers to scrape the icing off the plate (and then put in my mouth...that stuff tasted pretty good too). Then I was all set to write the birthday message and grabbed the icing tubes from the cupboard. Again, things don't last over a year in a cupboard. So there is no message wishing the Spazz a Very Happy Birthday or Happy B-day or even Hi Spazz.
So I found some candy sprinkles, haphazardly threw them on the cake and now here is the finished product. Not bad for a first-timer, there's definitely room for improvement, but I'd say A overall for effort. Next time I'll buy a cake.
