Chocolate Cake Catastrophe!

Moist Chocolate Cake
2 cups of sugar
1-3/4 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup baking cocoa
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1 cup strong brewed coffee
1 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup vegetable oil 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon confectioners sugar

In a large mixing bowl, combine the first six ingredients. Add eggs, coffee, buttermilk,oil and vanilla; beat on medium speed for 2 minutes (batter will be thin.) Pour into a greased and floured 10-in. fluted tube pan. Bake at 350° for 45-50 minutes or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean. Cool for 10 minutes before removing from pan to a wire rack to cool completely. Dust with confectioners' sugar.

This is my absolute favorite cake of all time, and my favorite dessert for that matter. This is the cake my mom always makes me for my birthday! I have seen it made many times and I have actually helped make it a couple of those. You would think that helping cook the cake before would have given me the upper edge on the whole experience, but NO...

CHOCOLATE GOODIES
The ingredients for the chocolate cake are very simple. The only thing I didn't have in my apartment was buttermilk and I also had to make a small pot of coffee. Other than that it is such an easy recipe for such a delicious cake. It is usually meant to be cooked in a 10 in. fluted tube pan but my roommate wanted her birthday cake to be "heart shaped". First lesson I can share here is to not cook a cake in a pan other than the pan that the recipe calls for. There was a specific reason why this cake is done in a fluted pan, and I didn't even think about it.

COOKING UP CAKES
I know I have said It is such a simple recipe, and it really is! I felt like I was done mixing it up in no time. I just got out my giant mixing bowl and started off with the first 6 dry ingredients. Then
I added in the rest of the wet ingredients. Nothing tricky or complicated and even I knew what everything was! I didn't even need a mixer and I just stirred it up with a spoon until there were no clumps. The batter will be very runny, but that is why the cake is so moist and yummy. Voila! That's all for the batter! I greased up my heart shaped tins until they were dripping with Pam and then poured the batter evenly into both of them. Then I popped them in the oven on 350° for 45 minutes. Easy as pie! Wait, easy as cake!

BAKING? SIMPLE?
I almost had myself fooled there for a second. I thought this was going to be easy. I should have known something was going to go terribly wrong. About 25 minutes into the baking time I smelled an awful burnt chocolate smell filling our whole apartment. I ran to the oven to find chocolate spilling out all around the heart tins and all around the edges were burning. The center of the cakes were hardly cooked and the outer rings were burned to a crisp. I should have known that I couldn't cook this cake in a heart shape flat pan but I didn't even think about it. There was also too much batter in both heart pans for the cake to cook evenly and it needed a different temperature and cook time to cook it right. When I took both cakes out of the oven I let them cool for a long time since they were barely even cooked. When I went to flip the first one out of the tin it got completely stuck and the middle uncooked part stayed in the tin and the rest fell out. It was destroyed. There was no resemblance to a heart what so ever. The second heart was my last shot, and this was the less exploded heart. I flipped it over very slowly, patted it on the back and then a heart actually came out! There were some missing pieces to the heart but it was good enough to make a birthday cake out of. The lesson I learned here was to cook in what the recipe calls for. Though mainly I learned not to let my friends get choosy, even if it is their birthday.

DECORATING THIS DISASTER
As we know I will no longer be making icing, so for this cake I used the store bought kind. If it was up to me there would not have been any icing on the cake since this chocolate cake is supposed to be made icing free. Once again the lesson to be learned, choosy friends ruin food. This cake would normally be a plain moist chocolate cake, and it is delicious. Without the mess ups and heart shapes it is a great cake for beginners to try. If you are a chocolate cake nut like me, this one's for you.







Extra Special Caution:
Do not leave cakes in the oven to hide them. It may or may not result in your roommate's parents turning on the oven to preheat it thus melting the cake and making the fire alarm go off. Then your cake will be unreadable and look like goo. (See photo on left.)




THIS GETS VOTED BIRTHDAY SCUM.