Caketastrophe

Over the years, I've had a couple of cake mishaps. One was because I put the cake in a cake carrier as soon as I finished it without letting it crust over and then delivered it to work the next morning (an hour drive). The border on the top of the cake started falling off. The girl I made it for (one of my best customers) took it in stride and ate the thing anyway. She's a cake nut, so the appearance wasn't a huge issue to her. There was another one where someone requested that I put sliced strawberries in the middle of the cake layers. I liked this idea, but as an experiment, it needed some refining. Strawberries weep, and in the presence of sugar, they weep a lot. Even though I put a good layer of icing between the strawberries and the edge of the cake, they started weeping out the side in places. There were also berries on top that I thought I could contain with a thick border of icing on the top. They pulled out so much juice that they started flooding over the sides. Live and learn. In fact, I need to try that one again.

This time, I think I made several mistakes. It happens to the best of us. This cake was to be one of the easier ones I've done in quite some time. A simple white cake with white icing and a few letters on top. No problem.

I got the request on Thursday to do a cake Thursday night so a friend could give it to his son on Saturday. Since I would only see them at work, I had to do the cake Thursday night so I could deliver it Friday. No problem...

First mistake was that I changed the way that I greased the cake pans so the cake wouldn't stick. The classic way is to use shortening and put a thin layer all over the pan. Follow that up with a dusting of flour, tap out the pan and viola, non-stick. I recently looked at a Cake Doctor book which recommended just using non-stick cooking spray on the pan and then following that up with flour. It works well, but caused some problems. Now, I used this technique on the X-Box 360 cake the week before and it worked great. However, that cake was iced and covered with fondant. It also didn't have to travel. When you use this technique, you end up with a little more flour on the outside surface of the cake. Maybe you can brush some of it off, but it still makes a rather dusty surface. This was the start of my problem.

Next, I put just a little more water in the icing than I usually do because I wanted it a little softer for spreading. I'm not sure this was a major issue, because wetter icing should stick better and moisten the surface. However, it doesn't firm up as much and takes longer to dry out or crust over. I had a heck of a time putting the top border on the cake. The bottom one wasn't an issue, but the top one gave me grief. At first, I chalked it up to being out of practice since I haven't been doing a lot of cakes lately. After being upset with the result a third time, I started thinking that it wasn't my technique and that the icing was a little thinner than normal. I was exceedingly careful the fourth time I put the top border on to make sure that nothing leaned over the sides. The problem was that the thinner icing would pull on anything leaning over the side of the cake and start to droop, so I made sure that wouldn't happen. I finally got it right and left it to dry.

Third problem, and the one I should know better. Since it was a friend and I didn't have time to go get a cake box, I used a cake carrier. Now, I did let the cake sit out for a couple of hours before putting the top on, but it apparently wasn't enough. The problem with a cake carrier is that they are air tight. It doesn't let the moisture out and allow the icing to firm up well. The moisture inside the carrier will soften the icing. I thought that I had let it dry out enough that it wouldn't be a problem. Not so.

The icing fell off of one whole side of the cake. I started getting a sick feeling when I looked over at it about half way to work. When I got to the office, I kept looking at it as I tooled around the office before I figured out what I could do. I managed to use the icing that fell off to fix the cake and make it presentable. I suspect that the icing fell off because of the dusty outside of the cake's surface, but that didn't really matter to me at that point. I used a plastic knife (not the best cake decorating tool) to pull up and smooth over the icing from the sides. Since I didn't have a piping bag handy, the top border had to go. The result was presentable, but not very pretty to me.

I told my friend what happened and not to worry about paying me for it, or he could take me to lunch since it wasn't up to par with my normal work. He paid me anyway, darn it.

In case you are wondering what it on top of the cake, it stands for lean six sigma. It's a process of continuous quality improvement that some companies use. I've working at companies which have completely ruined six sigma processes, so I'm not a terribly big fan. My friend's son had landed a job as a quality engineer recently, and this was to celebrate that new job.

You would think that the story is finished there. Nope. Devil cake wasn't done yet. I let the cake sit out all day to make sure that the icing would dry out completely an there wouldn't be any more issues. I even told him to do the same the following day prior to taking it to wherever they were going to celebrate. He took the cake and put it in the car for his drive home (also over an hour). Our Texas summers are hot, very hot. The car was warm, and he put it on the floor. The heat softened the icing and it started to fall off again! He said he was able to fix it well enough when he got home and they finished the whole thing off over the weekend. The top never had an issue, only the sides. Maybe it was the heat, maybe it wasn't, but that cake as nothing but ptoblems from start to finish. Sadly, it was one of the easier ones that I've done in quite some time. In fact, this cake was so boring that I wasn't even going to take pictures of it or write about it. Maybe the cake took offense to that and decided to get even...