Something Different Sunday - The Great Birthday Cake Disaster

I've had it in my head that I wanted to make a birthday cake from scratch for a birthday which was on Saturday. So Friday I began the process of making a two layer cake for them and many disasters followed.

The recipe I used can be found here at expat chow. She made a very complicated recipe really easy to follow. My first mistake with this is not using a round cake pan. I didn't buy one because they are expensive to buy in Switzerland and we are moving back to the US eventually and I hate buying stuff that will end up being left behind.

At this point everything is going good. I have the chocolate, olive oil, and butter mixture cooling in the pot on the left. In the mixing bowl I have just creamed the eggs with sugars. I'm feeling really confident that my cake will turn out perfect!

Mixing the rest of the ingredients in.

Ready for the oven.

While the cake is in the oven I begin reading the instructions for the cream filling and frosting. That is where I realized that I didn't have enough cream and dark chocolate. It's 7pm and the cake needs to be in the oven for another 10 minutes. We live on the outskirts of the city. The closest grocery store is a 10 minute tram ride and the store closes at 8pm. If I don't make it to that grocery store, then I have to make the 27 minute tram ride to downtown Zurich to the grocery store that is open till 10pm. Thankfully, I made it in time to the closest store. Bought my stuff and came home to get to work on the cream filling and frosting.

Cream filling is in the mixing bowl. Needs to be set in the fridge for an hour before I whip it. Cutting board has chocolate that I'm cutting for the frosting.

I've finished both the frosting and filling now. While they are setting in the fridge for a no hour I began work on taking the cake out of the pan. This is the first failure I had. I was having such a difficult time getting it out of the pan. Then bam, it just falls out into a crumble messed on my cutting board.

I recollected myself and decided since I still have enough ingredients I'll just quickly make another cake. Then, while I was getting butter out of the fridge to grease the pan another accident happen.

The kind of accident that makes you swear uncontrollably. May I add that liquid chocolate is really a pain in the ass to clean up... I tracked chocolate everywhere trying to clean this up. Once I have that cleaned up I looked at the second cake I made. It didn't rise and it tasted awful. Which left me to have to use the original cake I made.

At least the frosting and filling turned out.

I  managed to salvage what was left to make two layered pieces. Not very pretty, but made it's edible at least.

I still had a lot of leftover crumbles of cake. So I became very resourceful and made dirt cake out of it. Anyone remember grade school when the cool kids came to school with dirt cake for their birthday complete with gummy worms? So with the leftovers I made 6 dirt cake cups.

The first cake I made was full of disasters. What matters most is that it still really tasted awesome! I'm going to make this again when I have round cake pans. More specifically the spring form kind, so I don't have another crumbled mess.

All 24 candles. :P