mishap

after being away for nearly three weeks, i’ve finally been able to spend some quality time with my oven. unfortunately, my oven does not seem to be appreciating the attention and my brain seems to have been left behind in the IE. ;-)

in an attempt rescue a long forgotten bag of fuji apples lounging around in the back of the fridge I attempted a to make an apple cake with a caramel topping. the best thing about the recipe was that I potentially would be able to make the cake without making a trip to the store for ingredients. sure, some substitutions would need to be made. but after being away for so long I was rather proud of myself for having found a recipe that didn’t require a grocery store run.

Mistake #1:
the recipe calls for two cups of brown sugar right? in goes the sugar. oh wait. one cup in the batter and one cup for the caramel sauce! not to be deterred, i assessed that (being of the camp that nothing can be TOO sweet) this would not prevent people from actually eating the cake.

Mistake #2:
a twelve cup bundt pan? oh sure… i THINK that my silicone bundt pan is a twelve cupper. as batter is suddenly oozing out of the bundt pan onto the bottom of my oven, I realize that THINKING that your bundt pan is a twelve cupper does not actually make it a reality.

Mistake #3:
the toothpick doneness test is pretty failproof. slide in the toothpick and if it comes out dry then presumably the cake is done. think again my friends! when mistakenly using a less than twelve cup bundt pan for a twelve cup recipe there is a portion of the cake that is not able to be reached by conventional toothpick alone.
after pulling the cake out of the oven and turning it out onto the cooling rack suddenly uncooked cake batter was filling the hole of the bundt cake! it was sort of like a volcano and an apple cake all rolled into one.

so that experiment, sadly, went into the garbage.

tonight has been another adventure with the oven. inspired by chockylit’s tantalizing cupcakes, i finally settle on her coconut lime cupcakes. i use bastardized versions of the chronicle’s basic vanilla cupcake and basic sweet buttercream frosting recipe. easy enough. oh wait! i set the oven to the wrong temperature. hmmm… i guess i’ll just cook them longer. will that dry them out? oh well, too late. they’re already cooked anyways.

isn’t chockylit’s frosting pretty? it has just the slightest green tinge to it. maybe I’ll try that out. oops! how did all that food coloring get into there?! oh geez. there’s a hole in my green food coloring bottle! quick! add more sugar. maybe that will balance it out. maybe people won’t notice the odd green pastel color.

sigh. at least the picture came out kind of cool.