CakeWalk

When I asked my son what kind of cake he wanted for his birthday, he said "vanilla.  with chocolate icing."  I should have stopped right there, but oh no...when it came up again, I couldn't help myself, "what about a chocolate and vanilla cake?" 

"Yeah!"  he liked that.

"And we could do it in an alternating pattern!"  (and yes, that's the sound of me, beginning to get carried away)

"Uh, okay." 

"And it could look like a checker board!"  (yes, officially carried away)

"YEAH!"  (he really likes this)

"Uh, okay.  okay!"  (that's me, realizing that I have managed to turn his simple request into a major saturday-filling task for myself.  I may never learn.  sigh.)

Saturday morning finds me in the kitchen, breaking out the chocolate, mixing up cake number one.  As I poured the batter into the pan, I thought to myself this is not going to release when it's baked.  Sure enough, it stuck to the pan in a major way.  So cake number one landed here:

Cakes number two (vanilla) and three (chocolate) were both baked in pans that were greased, lined with parchment and re-greased.  They released.

I didn't do a very good job trimming the tops or measuring the pieces (but I did a great job of keeping my panic in check as the hours flew by faster and faster....)  The structure was looking a little lop-sided, but some extra icing helped hold it together.  Luckily, both cakes were pretty structurally strong, somewhere between a layer cake and a pound cake, so they did hold their shape when stacked.  I once tried to make a "red barn" built-up cake using cake-mix cakes - might as well have been using marshmellows!  I think the candles got blown out before the roof came off that one!

Turned on it's side, iced and full of candles, it met the test of being a pretty tasty birthday cake.  For now, I've decided to postpone auditioning for any of those fancy-cake reality TV shows.