Disaster Cake

I decided to make my first cake today. It was to be an orange (the flavor, not the color), two-layer masterpiece with a meringue topping and strawberry whipped cream frosting.

Things started to go wrong pretty early on when I attempted to separate eggs for the meringue and the yolk kept breaking. I had a mini meltdown when I couldn't find my beaters. We've started watching Deadwood, so you better believe I was cussing up a storm Old West-style and calling my missing tools all sorts of unsavory similes for sex acts. Once found, they proved incapable of beating the meringue into the "stiff, white peaks" the recipe called for. More swearing ensued. After nearly going deaf from the blender noise I decided the gooey glops they were making would have to do.

Then I decided to put my oven racks one rung away from each other. Halfway into the baking process, this started to happen:


The meringue expanded so much that it stuck to both the rack and the cake pan above it. I tried to gently unstick it and to jiggle the rack loose, and the only thing both efforts got me was multiple burns.

After much maneuvering, I managed to flop my pathetic excuses for gateau onto a cooling rack. This is what they looked like:


Mind you, I was also planning on making a turkey for tonight's meal. The pressure to get everything ship-shape before I had to babysit/baste the bird for the next four hours made me swear like a sailor.

I figured I could hide the ugly under a layer of the whipped cream, and stack the less-offensive layer on top, like so:


Not so bad, right? Next I just needed to cover the exterior in frosting to make it all pretty-like. I channeled Duff from the Food Network's Ace of Cakes, and all my frosting efforts gained me was this:


It appears as if I just took fistfuls of whipped cream and lobbed them in the cake's general direction, but I was actually using a spatula to carefully transfer the frosting from the bowl to my masterpiece. This picture proves why I'm a better at thinking than at doing anything that requires motor skills.

But fret not my pets. I wasn't done with the little guy quite yet.

Behold: this is how I saved my boyfriend's birthday:


STRAWBERRIES! EVERYBODY DANCE!