I wonder how often I have to learn a lesson for it to finally sink in. Lessons and habits seem to go hand in hand. You have to do a thing so and so many times before it becomes a habit. Unless it’s bad for you then that thing you do even once is permanently engraved on your brain.
But the over-and-over thing for good habits seems to be the same thing for learning lessons. If it’s a lesson that will do you good, you have to learn it over and over. If it’s a lesson that evolves from something is bad for you or tastey, like say a diabetic eating a lot of sugar, you learn the lesson that your blood sugar doesn’t like it, your organs don’t like it, your vision doesn’t like it. But sugar is addictive and it takes time for the consequences of these actions to click in. So you don’t pay attention to that lesson. Until something drastic happens. Sadly you, well, more appropriately sadly I, have to learn the lesson over and over.
Today I learned that you can’t believe everything you read on the Internet. Gosh, that’s a surprise. I have learned that lesson lots of times. I’ve learned which web sites I can trust and which ones I can’t. You have to know the source, trust the source, know the person. You get what I am saying.
Well, I figured that you can’t go much wrong with recipes. Right? Well, not necessarily so.
We have a special birthday coming up. My sainted father-in-law will be 95 in a couple of days and I wanted to make him a special cake.
I had seen a recipe site ad on Facebook, showing a really neat checkerboard cake. You make three layers, colour and flavour each with a different colour and flavour then cut two concentric circles in each layer and interchange them. So, for example, and what I did, you make chocolate, green mint and white vanilla layers. Layer one, outer rim chocolate, middle circle green mint, inner circle white. Layer two, outer rim, mint green, middle circle white, inner circle chocolate. You get the picture. You ice the cake and when you cut into it the crowd gasps in awe as you reveal a three colour checker board interior. You are a genius in the kitchen. Yay.
I had thought to try this out on my Grandboys, but didn’t have a chance before this opportunity came along. So in my father-in-law’s kitchen, using foreign ingredients, a counter-top toaster oven and one cake pan, I set about to make this birthday cake wonder.
Another lesson, kind of telescoped into this lesson is that North American recipes don’t always translate into nice finished products when you use British ingredients and measuring implements. Flour has different moisture contents, and you have to pick among plain flour, strong flour, self-rising flour, bread flour and whole meal flour.
Sugar has so many varieties (including sugar specifically for espresso coffee) that it has its own aisle in the grocery stores. Vanilla comes in containers the size of food colouring. Measuring cups are in ounces, grams, millilitres and rarely cups. Ounces and millilitres I can figure out, the rest of the recipe has to hope I’ve asked the Siri the question properly. Ovens are marked in gas marks, not centigrade, celsius or Fahrenheit, so you can see the minefield baking can become.
So I get my cake batter mixed up, using the white cake recipe I’ve been using successfully for years, doubled, something else I have done successfully for years. I measure the resulting batter and divide it into three so I can be sure each layer will be the same height when baked, start with the vanilla layer, pop the one cake pan I have into the toaster over. (The reason we have a toaster oven and not a real oven is another story, involving Ken opening the proper oven’s door to check something cooking at a high temperature, and having the door fall off its hinges in his hands!), set the timer and get the second layer ready to go.
Of course the bottom of the white layer burns while the top part of the cake is barely baked. Oh well. I can cut that off. In pops the green layer. Expecting the same thing to happen, I reduce the temperature, set the timer and start hoping. Better luck with the green layer. Pop it out, pop in the chocolate layer. Figure I have the temperature and time right so don’t adjust anything. Guess again. Chocolate layer burns too. Not only that, it’s taller than the other layers. Even carefully measured. Even with the burned bits cut off.
The word “Disaster” is beginning to form in my brain.
The cakes cool. I cut the concentric circles. Problems arise because the edges of the white and chocolate layers are rough from having the burned portions cut off. Oh well, icing will fix that.
Start lifting the sections onto the cake plate to assemble and ice. Of course they fall into pieces. Of course all the different heights show. I had intended to ice the cake the British way with (purchased) Royal Icing, but Ken has convinced me that chocolate icing will be much better, so I make a chocolate icing. Of course the only bowl I have available is low-sided and flat so the icing sugar goes everywhere, coating every surface in the kitchen. Kitchen clean up nightmare. Oh well.
There isn’t enough icing sugar in the house to make enough icing to rescue this cake. No one will gasp with awe and great appreciation of my skills when I cut into this cake. More likely a UN-type giggle will sweep the room.
I use all the icing I have made trying to hold the various bits and pieces together in a semblance of a cake shape. Defeated, I open the package of Royal Icing, roll it out and place it hopefully around and over the cake with great hope that it will cover a multitude of sins. I need it to cover things AND to hold the cake together in one piece. Instead of looking lovely, it looks like the Frankenstein of cakes with funny lumps and bumps in all sorts of weird places. Nothing like the lovely smooth cake surface depicted on the packaging.
I’ve been to the local baker. I’m buying a cake.
Years ago, decades ago actually, I tried to make an “8” out of layer cakes to make a special 8th birthday cake for my daughter. I should have remembered that event today, perhaps learned from it, because that attempt didn’t work either, with the cake falling to pieces all over the kitchen.
Let me think about this. Maybe I can’t blame the Internet. Maybe the blame lays elsewhere. Hmmm.
PS. Ken took one look at the cake and said it looked like a trussed turkey. But my Sainted Father-in-law (note his title is now capitalized!), ooohed and ahhhed, said all the right things and told me it was delicious.
See you can almost see the drumsticks and winge along the sides.
With the layers held together with chocolatge icing and the whole thing held together with royal icing, it is a far cry from the cake I saw on the Internet.
Happy birthday dear Father.