Cake Baking Sunday

Yes...this is a picture that my son, Tae took of my kitchen sink. However, it reminded me to tell the story of my past Sunday. It was to be Jenna's family birthday party with my parents and sister. It happened to fall on Father's Day and so I wanted to bake a cake to share with my family to make it more like a birthday party (and to celebrate Father's Day!) So, the day began. I showered quickly and got the kids dressed with Rob's help. I then proceeded to make homemade icing...which turned out wonderfully delicious! What do you need with icing but a cake, right? So, out popped my box of cake mix,(Betty Crocker, of course!) and I tried to make a cake using this pan pictured above. It is really a springform pan, but it is quite deep and I thought that I would pour all the batter in and bake a cake without having to piece together two smaller cakes. It cooked all the way through, however, it stuck to the inside of the pan. I couldn't use this cake. It was a bunch of broken up crumbs. So, I started to make my second cake mix from a box. This one I made sure to spray extra Pam on the pan and flour it so it wouldn't stick. It totally did not cook in the middle of the cake. It was awful! So, I washed out the mixing bowl (AGAIN!) and realized that I had run out of box mixes. I then went to allrecipes.com and found a chocolate cake mix for which I had all the ingredients. I made the cake, (this time in a 9x13) and it turned out! Then I was off to church. Church went smoothly and when I got home, I decided to ice the cake right away. That's when I noticed the trouble I was in. My icing, even though I put it in the fridge sealed up, was too thick. I couldn't stop my bags from breaking open and my decorator's tips from falling out of the bag due to pressure from the thick icing. The cake ended up looking TERRIBLE!! Globs of icing in different colors with an ugly "J" in the middle for Jenna. (Accidently, of course.) Later in that day, we tried the cake. Everyone was excited about homemade cake and icing. It looked like it was all going to turn out, until we CUT INTO THE CAKE!!! Duh, duh,dum..... (That's the scary music in the background.) :) It was ORANGE. Not brown like most chocolate cakes, (alright, I'll admit..... ALL chocolate cakes) are. My dad even asked if I had made "spice cake". Yeah, it was that bad. So for all that hard work, we had dried, orange, "chocolate" cake with hard icing... in the shape of a crappily iced cake! Never again I tell you.... Never again.