I admit it. I should have made the cake the night before. Or, I shouldn't have gone out that night knowing I had to make the cake. My bad! However, I can't change what I did do.
Before I get started with the actual story, here's the back story. . .
It all started when a group of us at work had decided we'd throw a little belated surprise birthday party during lunch this week for two of our coworkers. We were all going to bring something. I had the bright idea to bake a cake. I hadn't baked in a long time and happened to have a cake mix I had gotten awhile back at home and since I don't bake as much as I use to I figured why not - it would be easy to whip up. Someone would make brownies, another would get fruit, chips and for our "main course" White Castle. My boss had suggested those of us making items not wait until Monday to make the cake.
That was last Thursday.
Let's now fast forward to this past Monday . . .
What did I do? Yep! That's right, I waited until Monday.
Not only did I wait for Monday, I waited until 10PM on Monday evening to start making the cake. Now, I probably would have started sooner on the cake had I not hung out that evening with a friend, but I had been sick last week and felt the need to catch up on social time.
Sign #1:
So, it's Monday night and I got home close to 10PM knowing I still had to make this cake. No problem. I wasn't starting from scratch and I wasn't planning on going to sleep anytime soon. I got out the mix (which was already out of the box), eggs, water and oil. I plugged in my stand mixer and went to grab the mix box just to make sure I had everything I needed. There was no box to be found. I guess I had thrown out the box when I took the mix out of it. Good thing I had picked up an extra mix for the cake I would be making this coming weekend along with the icing before heading home.
Problem solved! I was still optimistic that this cake would turn out fantastic as my cakes do.
Sign #2:
I had all my ingredients together and I was ready to start mixing. First the mix went into the bowl. Then the water. Then the oil. Last would be the eggs. However, as I was cracking the last egg the shell decided it wanted to take a swim along with the yoke. Oy! That I would need to shift through the mixed mess to make sure little pieces of the shell hadn't made its way in.
That was a fun process, but at the end of the day that's what needed to be done.
Sign #3:
I heart my KitchenAid stand mixer so much. It does such a good job at really mixing everything up.
The next step of this cake catastrophe was to mix everything up. No big deal. That's what my stand is for. I turned the mixer on and took care of a few things. Now keep in mind I was not formally keeping track of how long the mixer was actually going or how long I needed it to run and at what power level. It's past 10PM, I may be awake, but I'm starting to slow down for the day.
I turned the mixer off. Unfastened the bowl from the stand and proceeded to pour the batter into the pan. That's when I saw it. Not all the of the mix had gotten mixed in with the other ingredients. Ugh! So I decided to not pour that portion into the pan.
Sign #4:
The oven was preheated and ready to do its magic. Thirty minutes later, my beautiful cake emerged from the oven. Though I wanted to immediately frost this puppy and call it an evening at this point I knew I had to let the cake cool before any frosting could be applied. This is where things totally fell apart. This is the point I should have decided to wake up extra early to finish out the process instead of believing I could do it all right then and there.
I let the cake cool down, or so I thought. I went to apply the yummy chocolate butter cream frosting only to find it was clumping. What? Ugh! The end result? What I now affectionately call "The Hit and Run Cake."
As I said at the beginning, the moral of the story is: Nothing good happens after 10PM - at least when it comes to baking a cake.
Until later . . .
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