a tale of whoa!

(a Post-Tortem Analysis)

For the past few months, I have been creating cakes and cupcakes for an excellent organization called For Goodness Cakes - a grassroots collection of cake bakers who provide birthday, graduation, and other celebratory treats for at-risk youth and foster children. I cannot express enough how fulfilling this volunteer work is for me.

If I were to grade these creations (and, of course I do), I would say they average at about a B to B+. Today’s cake, however, has brought my cake-decorating GPA to a paltry 1.0….(sad trombone).

It started out as a delicious, too-moist (I know you all love that word), tower of Tres Leches magnificence! And although the recipe blogger assured me the layer cakes would hold up, I am sad to say that I was informed incorrectly. Actually, the cakes came out perfect, and had I made them the night before, I could have frozen them overnight. This would have given the sweetened milk that seeped so beautifully throughout the cake a more solid structure, and also kept the surface cold enough to hold the whipped cream.

But that is not what I did.

I allowed my sugar-coated hubris to fly too close to the sucrose sun, and I paid the price. Please, take a seat my friends, and listen to my tale of whoa about the beautiful Tres Leches birthday tower that met its fate upon the linoleum floor of an office building. I’d offer you a piece of cake and coffee, but…..

The recipe called for a thickening of instant pudding, which I executed with perfect precision. Then, once the once liquid and viscous cream was whipped into peaks as sharp as a shark’s tooth, the two were combined to make a tasty, albeit slippery, icing. This was then smoothed over the top of layer #1.

Usually, when I frost a cake’s top, the icing stays exactly where I left it. However, in this case, the puddin-whipped topping along the edges began to transform from a fluffy, pale-yellow cream, to a translucent paste dotted with floating clumps. It was more appetizing looking than it sounds.

Ignoring the warning signs, I proceeded to cut and place strawberries all around the top of the layer, like a crown of plump, red cherubs basking in a foaming sea of leche. Another layer of whipped-puddin-cream, and voila! I placed the other layer on top of the first, and though this layer seemed a little more flaccid and a little less compliant to its placement, I managed to land it perfectly. It was a sight to see, all 8.24” of it.

Even after topping it, and leveling the sides, several of the basement strawberries - no doubt aware that when a tower is about to fall, those on the lowest floors are doomed - leapt to their deaths. As is my usual method for addressing chaos in a time crunch, I chose to move faster in the hopes of out-melting the mess. Oh, how I never learn!!

The delivery boxes I have on hand were too small to house this monstrosity, so I did what any self-respecting - and utterly unashamed - artist would do: I took it out to the van as naked as Lady Godiva, carefully placed it on the seat, and began the five minute drive to my rendezvous point. The weather outside was a lovely, warm 78 degrees.

Inside the van, however, where the sun shone directly and unabashedly into the very car seat where I placed my Cakey Godiva, it was closer to 250 degrees. I was undeterred. That was, until I took a relatively shallow left turn. It was all it took to overcome the almost non-existent friction between the two layers and what once was a two layer cake, was now two separate cakes. One of which was frosted on both the top and bottom in some sort of avant garde foppery.

I may have cussed.

Once I arrived at my destination, only a short two miles away, I did my best to rejoin the divorced layers. All the time telling myself that with a clean butter knife, or a standard ruler (sanitized, obvs), I could save this masterpiece. I swept into the building like a dessert paramedic, praying to reach a kitchen operating room before my patient flatlined, but as I flew past the guard, seated inside the glass doors, the cake succumbed. The section holding the swirly Happy Birthday sign fell to the floor with a splat.

I may have cussed.

For all my racing and wishy-thinking, it was not to be. This cake was too good for this world (or, my methods were too bad), and now it lay at the bottom of the food waste can in an unmarked break room behind the aforementioned guard. Sigh

After I called and offered a halting and blame-shifting apology, we agreed that I would redo the cake and deliver it the following Wednesday. I plan to purchase a cake collar - a stiff, transparent tube to go around a cake and not, as I first thought, some kind of sweets fetish implement.

Cakey Godiva will rise again!!