Good Day, Bad Cake.

My little sister graduated yesterday from The University at Buffalo with a double major in English and Environmental Sciences.

Her graduation was on Mother's Day, just like mine was 4 years ago...from the same place, with the same major! (Well...just English...she went the extra mile and tacked on Environmental Science.)

The ceremony was about 2.5 hours long. There were a lot of kids to get through; and this was only the College of Arts and Sciences!

Their speaker was New York Senator Charles Schumer. He gave a nice, short, sweet speech that I actually think was very similar to the one he gave at my graduation 4 years ago. He talked about growing up, taking risks, reaching higher, and "going for it."

Kay and Me

Our family

Kay and her boyfriend

The graduate!

So, I mentioned in a past post that I bought a Wilton cake decoration kit. I wanted to make a cake to celebrate Kayla's graduation, and I thought this was the perfect opportunity to break it out and give it a go.

I made two 8'' round cakes the night before. I took the recipe from the same book that I used to make my chocolate cake with coffee butter cream frosting, however, the recipe called for all-purpose flour...all I had was Bob's Red Mill stone-ground whole wheat flour.

While I cooked with that flour a few times before, it was mostly for pancakes and biscuit-type cookies - not cake. But, it was all I had and I needed to make the cakes the night before to ensure they had proper time to cool before frosting. So, I used the stone-ground whole wheat flour.

I will never, ever do that again.

I first knew something was wrong when it came out of the oven. The cakes smelled slightly...play dough-y. Yeah...not good. Nonetheless, I let them cool and planned on using them for the cake.

I woke up Sunday morning at 6:30 a.m. to prepare the frosting and the piping tubes. This was my first time playing with frosting tips and bags, so I wanted to be sure I had some wiggle room before I had to start getting ready to head out for the graduation.

I stacked up the two cakes with a layer of frosting in the middle and went to town on the decorating.

I only used two tips (a star tip and a #3) to keep it simple for my first try. I was pretty happy with how it turned out, given it was my very first time. After decorating, I packed up the cake and headed off to watch the ceremony.

When it finally came time to eat the cake, Kayla cut into it and as soon as we removed the first slice, it smelled like fresh...play dough.

We put slices on the plates, took our first bites, and it tasted like fresh...play dough.

Well, shoot.
That didn't work out as well as I hoped it would.

The only good thing about the whole darn cake was the frosting. The stone-ground whole wheat flour was DEFINITELY not made for cakes.

I will never be making that mistake again.

 

Kayla was a champ, though. She pretended to like it.

It's okay, we're getting together next weekend for dinner and I promised I would redeem myself with a TASTY treat.

So, no recipe, but I thought you'd get a kick out of my little story. Hey, you can't win them all.

Have you ever had a baking/cooking disaster and had no choice but to serve it? Did it turn out horrible, or is it something you laugh about today?