Cake Fail

Posted by Kalie on October 28, 2009

Last night my friend Sandy from Hong Kong and I decided to bake a cake since she had never made one before.  I was so excited to be a part of her first cake baking experience!  As it baked in the oven, it smelled absolutely delicious!  We let it cool for awhile and frosted it with chocolate frosting.  Sandy, two of my flatmates (Nicki and Pauline), and I sat down to have a taste.  I had the first bite, and I immediately knew something had gone horribly wrong with the cake; it was way too bitter.  I tried to stifle the disgusted look on my face before anyone could see, but Nicki had noticed.  She asked, “What’s wrong?”  I began with, “Umm…” and that’s all I could get out before the others figured out what was wrong: the cake was awful!  And the more we ate, the worse it tasted!  We soon decided it wasn’t worth eating any more of, but we would leave it around for our other unsuspecting flatmates to try.  :)  Luckily I had bought Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food ice cream earlier, so I broke that out and we found a new use for the disgusting cake: a scoop of ice cream + a bit of frosting off the top of the cake = heaven in your mouth!  We had a good laugh over the awfulness of the cake and enjoyed the ice cream instead.

After some thought, the chocolate cake failure could be attributed to several factors:

• The scale wasn’t working to use metric measurements, and I don’t have any US measuring cups, so I had to eyeball how much of ingredients to put in.
• The recipe said to put in two pinches of salt.  Sandy was just going to lightly salt the mixture, but it instead poured out of the shaker rather quickly.
• I replaced baking powder with baking soda.  Google told me it was okay to do, but now I’m not so sure.
• The milk we used had a “Best By” date of October 23.  Yesterday was October 27.  It stilled smelled good though.
• The recipe called for cocoa powder.  At Morrisons (the supermarket), I asked an employee where I could find cocoa powder for baking a cake.  After neither one of us could find it, she told me just to use hot chocolate mix and it would work just the same.  I believe this may be the leading factor in what made it taste so bad.  I think the powder burned while the cake was baking.

Despite making an awful cake, it was fun.  There would be no story from this experience if it had been the most delicious cake ever!

Finally, some words of wisdom from my mom, the FCS teacher: “I heard you had some troubles with the cake – oh well…that’s what cake mixes are for!”  Coincidentally, I had bought a cake mix in case my cake was a flop.  She’s taught me well.  🙂

Cheers!

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