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