Baking Experiences: White Christmas Peppermint Cake

Yesterday I posted a review of Rose Levy Beranbaum's new book, The Baking Bible along with a giveaway of the book and Rose's Heavenly Cake Strips. In the post I mentioned for the millionth time that I'm not a baker, and so I thought I would share the experience with you here today. Let's call this "what happens when a non-baker bakes", or "The Three Day Cake", or "how I can single-handedly turn my life into a disaster" along with a few moments of considering quitting blogging altogether.

If you read the review, you know I was asked to make the White Christmas Peppermint Cake. Please keep in mind that I am NOT blaming the recipe for the disaster this turned into, I am blaming myself! Let's start at the beginning, it was Wednesday:

The cake strips. I, who last made a cake maybe ten years ago, had never heard of cake strips. I tried and tried fitting them around my 9-inch cake pans and couldn't get it to work, so as a last resort I decided to go onto Amazon and read the reviews to figure out what I was doing wrong. As soon as I saw the picture I knew. The cake strips are supposed to go on the OUTSIDE of the pans, not the INSIDE!! I don't know why I thought they went on the inside, but I did. Yeah.

 

So, that wasted 20-30 minutes. Next:

The list of "special equipment" in the recipe calls for parchment rounds and baking spray with flour. My regular grocery store carries neither, so I decided to make my own by cutting parchment paper into "rounds" as good as I could and then spraying with regular cooking spray, sprinkling with just a little flour ( I used cake flour, not regular flour), and rubbing it together with my finger to blend. Um, okay, I can't cut straight.

Somewhere during all this I realized there was absolutely no way I was going to be able to finish the cake, white chocolate custard base, and complete the white chocolate buttercream before I had to get my daughter off the bus, do dishes, and make dinner, followed by the rest of our night. I decided to go ahead with cake anyway and cover it until the next day.

Making the cake itself was okay, I weighed EVERYTHING,  which is highly suggested in The Baking Bible. Of course, this is a huge part of why I don't bake, I prefer cooking because I can add and subtract ingredients as I feel like, and even change my own recipes the next time I make them. You can't do that so easily with baking. Like my friend Becca told me, you have to love formulas and math in order to love baking, and well, I hate both and pretty much failed them in school.

The cakes were made, wrapped, and refrigerated for the next day. Great, until the next day when I had already brought out my eggs and butter to come to room temperature, and they had already been out for over an hour, when I made the horrible discovery that I didn't buy enough white chocolate for the buttercream! Are you kidding me??!! I had 8 ounces, and needed 13.2 ounces. There was nothing I could do about it right at that moment, and had to wait until that night to go to the grocery store.

Friday was Halloween. In the morning, I went to my daughters school parade with my sister and mother, then she had a half day so my sister stuck around to play with her while I made the icing. Well, I got it made, but realized I wasn't going to have enough time to cut the cakes into layers, ice the cake, and take photos before trick-or-treating with friends. So I had no choice but to refrigerate the icing until the next day. This changed the texture of the icing, but it was still usable.

So Saturday came and by then it was either finish the cake or forget it, it wasn't getting done. That's when I made my next error. I knew I was going to have a problem cutting the cake into layers, but I thought I had the knife right in the middle. What I didn't realize what that the tip of the knife bent up...and sliced right through the top of the cake. That layer fell completely apart when I tried to lift it, turning the cake into a 3-layer cake instead of 4. Good news, that meant the cake had extra frosting and peppermint pieces!

 

So there you have it, the true story of how making the cake turned out for me. I suppose it could have been much worse, I could have dropped the cake bringing it out to photograph it. Although, looking at these pictures, that might have been a good idea.   Please don't let my experience deter you from trying the recipe yourself, I just wanted to be honest about what happened. I might even make this a semi-regular thing, I try a difficult (for me, not you, I know your laughing at me), likely baking, recipe and post about the experience. What do you think?