A Failed Pursuit of Perfection

Is being a perfectionist a weakness? Well if it involves messing up a birthday cake for your best friend, then yes it is a weakness—a big, gooey ugly weakness.

I decided to make a cake for my friend Faith’s birthday last week. But this wasn’t going to be an ordinary Betty Crocker box cake—open, mix, bake, eat—I was going to bake a genuine “from scratch” cake. Faith has had to cut all dairy and egg products from her diet because of her son E.’s newly discovered food allergies. So I thought it might be nice treat for her to have a yummy cake sans eggs and dairy. Having no recipes for such a cake, I searched for one on the Internet and found what I thought was a winner: raisin spice cake with faux cream cheese frosting.

One evening I made stop at our local health foods store to pick up non-dairy margarine (I had never realized that margarine has dairy in it!) and non-dairy cream cheese (yes, such a thing exists). After expanding my culinary knowledge of alternative foods, I headed home with high hopes. Around 11 the next morning I started the cake by boiling the Crisco, water, raisins and combination of spices. I’m stirring the boiling mixture thinking how awesome I am. Woohoo, I’m baking and it smells good; go me! After 10 minutes of boiling I took the saucepan off the burner to let it cool pursuant to the recipe’s instructions. Now I mistakenly thought it would take 30 minutes for the raisin mixture to cool, so when I burned my finger checking it 45 minutes later I was more than a little ticked. Into the fridge went the saucepan. I thought this a very brilliant idea—not so much. Thirty minutes later I opened the fridge to find a nice hardened ½ inch layer of Crisco atop a sticky slosh of raisins. Crap. Back to square one. I reboiled the mixture and let it cool on its own for about an hour and a half. Next I mixed it with the dry ingredients and poured it into a greased 9x13 pan, I repeat a greased 9x13 pan, and then put it into the oven for 45 minutes.

Part of my disaster

Sometime later I frantically pulled the cake out of the oven because I had forgot to set the timer. I inexpertly judged the cake done and let it cool for a while then flipped it out of the greased pan onto a cooling rack. It seems that I own a selfish cake pan because it insisted on keeping chunks of the cake bottom. As the cake cooled I discovered a tiny spot of slightly uncooked cake in the middle. No problem. I sliced a two-inch strip from the middle giving me two 9x5 ½ sections of cake. I placed the two portions together on an upturned cookie sheet and covered them with the fake cream cheese frosting I made earlier. Done. I had what looked like a delicious cake (despite the slightly off color of the frosting). As a finishing touch, I sprinkled raisins over the top. Next I moved the cake, or rather portions of it, to an oval tray. Apparently my patch job with the frosting tricked me into picking the cake up like it was one solid piece, not two separate ones placed side by side. My result was four pieces of cake each having a jagged, crumbly edge. Hmmm…how about a layer cake. I stacked two layers before remembering I had already washed the bowl with remaining frosting thus leaving me no frosting to finish the sides of the cake. Frustrated and not thinking, I indelicately grabbed the top layer causing it to separate into two unequal portions. I tried scraping the remaining top layer off and instead mashed cake crumbs into the frosting covering the top of the bottom layer. Okay, Faith will only get half of the cake, I can use the other two pieces that I didn’t stack and just rework the frosting to cover the exposed edges. Great idea except for the raisins placed into the hardening frosting. Instead of spreading the thick frosting into thinner layers I created a mass of raisin-studded frosting on my knife. Fine, I give up. I cut the last of the four cake portions into two, and salvaged a slice of similar size from an earlier botched attempt and placed them on a plate like three brownies. It’s now 5 in the afternoon, and the only things I’ve accomplished are 1) decorating my kitchen counter with cake crumbles, squished raisins and sticky frosting; and 2) giving my friend a pathetic offering of three slices of cake.

I’m thinking of opening a vegan bakery in the near future. Anyone interested in fronting the costs?