My sister makes cute cakes.

Today is Father's Day and my family invited themselves over for dinner.  I got to grill while my sister did dessert.  I was glad because I need a break from baking - I've gone a little crazy this week.  She made the cake from scratch and decorated it all by herself.  I believe she got the recipe from my mom's very old Betty Crocker cake cookbook that has lots of tips on decorating and creating shapes from 9x13 cakes.

So, after all of my defeat, here's what she comes to my house with:

How adorable!  And it was very, very tasty.  I guess we should for a team!

Now I'm Baking.

I had two good runs recently - Red Velvet Cheesecake Brownies and Red Velvet Whoopie Pies.  Notice a trend?  Both were great and turned out nicely because they didn't require any fancy decoration moves.  After those successes and browsing entirely too many recipes online, I got bakers-block.  I had no idea what to bake next.  I sent out a plea on facebook to gather requests so I could bake for other people and hopefully spare my waistline.  My good friend Amber, a friend that I met riding the bus to high school swim team, was the first to respond with pineapple upside down cake.  Ding-Ding-Ding - we have a winner!

I have made pineapple cupcakes before in silicone pans and they came out fine.  However, I used boxed pineapple cake mix and I'm not a big fan of the texture of boxed cakes.  Too light and floofy.  I searched for made-from-scratch recipes and found one that was two-layers - Oh heck yes.  I read the recipe over and over and convinced myself that I could successfully manage the horrific-ly scary 30-second task of flipping the cakes over.

This morning I went to the store and got my pineapple and my cherries.  I came home and I got my ingredients ready.  I opened the can of pineapple and behold - no beautiful rings of pineapple.  Instead I see chunks of pineapple.  I looked at the can again.  "Sliced Pineapple" with pictures of pineapple rings floating in the background.  Seriously?  The can is mislabeled???  Remember that bad luck?

I got over it and started to make my design in the melted butter and brown sugar (using extra butter to make sure it doesn't stick).  Before I started, I had wondered why the recipe didn't have me grease the pans first.  Because there's half a stick of butter, duh.  Plus I have fancy non-stick name-brand pans.  This will be fine.  I got my fruit arranged and made my batter, adding vanilla to the mix.  Who doesn't put vanilla in a cake?  I got the cakes in the oven and patiently awaited my doom while updating Amber on the status of the cake.  Really, I was informing her that I am in fact making her a cake.  She's getting it whether she likes it or not because I am capable of eating the entire thing for dinner.  We need to avoid that.

Beep.  Cake is done.  Toothpick comes out clean.  I grab my plate and flip.  I remove the pan.

75% of the pineapple chunks are still stuck to the pan.  I curse.

Round two.  I grab a spatula and angrily loosen the cake and hidden fruit.

10% of cake and fruit stick.  Looks a lot better, but nothing photo-worthy.

Whatever.  You get a photo anyway.  Here is the stupid thing:

I meticulously shoved the abandoned fruit back into the top of the cake.  Then, I took a spoon and ate the remains.  Whoa momma, that was good.

This is the exact moment that spurred me into creating this blog.

Try it for yourself if you dare:  Scroll down and download the .pdf here

The Beginning.

I love to bake.  It is therapeutic to obsessively measure and stir and make delicious things.  However, I have extremely bad luck through heredity.  I can remember many years ago watching my mom bake a pecan pie.  Now, mind you, my mom is an excellent pie baker.  She won Grand Champion at the Wyandotte County Fair for her apple pie.  It is epic.  But on this particular afternoon, my mom was baking away for a church function with my dad's Sunday school class.  She is very particular about the placement of her pecans on the top of the pie so that it looks perfect and is equally easy to slice.  When the timer went off, my mom went to the oven and opened the door.  She carefully grabbed the pie but a bad grip and gravity took over and the pie proceeded to flip over and I watched as the perfectly placed pecans and gooey filling cascaded down to the oven door.  All of this in slow motion.  My mom just stood there and stared at it.  I had no idea what to do because my mom has two sides of reaction:  anger and "oh-well".  On this day, she chose both.  She went upstairs, went in her room and locked the door.  My dad went to the party alone.

I tell you this story because you have to understand the kind of luck that runs in my family.  Whenever we try something new or make something important, at least one thing goes completely wrong.  This leads me to today.  I am an unemployed (unless you count substitute teaching) grad student who is bored.  So bored.  So I decided that I am going to start baking the things I have always wanted to try but was always to scared to attempt.


Last week I decided that I was going to make a Rainbow Cake.  I had seen this cake on several different blogs and thought to myself, "I can do that!  I got time!"  I carefully made each colorful layer and stuck them in the freezer so I could make my icing.  Why I decided to make my own icing (instead of following a recipe), I have no idea.

This is what happened:

 

And this:

Notice how the icing is oozing off of the cake plate and the entire cake is leaning.  Instead of blaming myself, I blamed the blue-layer of the cake since it baked the worst.  Definitely the blue-layer's fault.

Despite how terrible this cake looks, I ate it and OMG-NOM, it was amazing.  And since I baked this at my parents house, it stayed at my parents house so I couldn't eat the entire thing for dinner.  My mom told me the cake was beautiful and when I went back to the fridge a few hours later, 1/3 of the cake was gone.

So I guess I've started to accept that I am the worst cake decorator.  I know flavors and I make things taste great, but there's no way I can make the thing presentable according to package directions.  Or blogging directions.  Don't expect to see perfect pictures of confections on this site with fancy photography because it ain't happening.  I don't know what "beautiful cake" means.

If you want to attempt this yourself, be my guest!

Kaitlin Flannery's Rainbow Cake from marthastewart.com