Disaster Is Strawberry-Flavored

So the Lyle Lovett cake went from bad to worse as Friday progressed. "How bad?" you ask, Gentle Reader? Well, read on.

I considered whipping up another batch of frosting so I could at least cover the top of the cake and recover the sides, writing off the first coat as the crumb coat. I nixed that idea, though, because the boy's not a big fan of frosting. Plus...well, I didn't want to go to that much trouble. I had half of an opened draw of strawberry preserves along with a full, unopened one. Why not put it to use?

Strawberry preserves make for a great cake topping!

While I had the strawberry preserves as an unexpected but very useful resource for this birthday cake misadventure, I also had about a pint of strawberries I'd recently frozen for this occasion and now were largely unthawed in the 'fridge. Of course, do-it-yourself frozen strawberries don't thaw terribly well. They're oozy and can get mushy quick. But I had them thawed, thus I felt I had to use them.

Halved strawberries--even oozy and mushy--cover a fair number of sins!

Unfortunately, a failure of mine at this point came to be a big burden at this point: I'd failed to adequately level each cake tier, so the stacked cake was lopsided. Halved, oozy , mushy strawberries sitting atop gooey strawberry preserves on a lopsided cake succumb to the pull of gravity.

In other words, I had a hell of a time keeping the strawberries for the top of the cake on the top of the cake.

And as the strawberries went a'tumblin', so too did some of the preserves. Thus the cake, already looking like the effort of a 5-year-old baking novice, began to take on a bloody appearance.

In the immortal words of Jean-Luc Godard, "It's not blood. It's red."

Yep, that's cake karma for you. And I couldn't exactly repair the damage at that point, for I wasn't about to disassemble the cake, try again to level each tier, reassemble the cake, adding more strawberry preserves filling as needed, then try to smooth out the frosting. That's just not feasible.

My solution? I grabbed a lid for a Corelle Visions Grab-It, propped up the cake plate on the side with the most downward tilt and hoped for the best when I popped it into the 'fridge until it was time for it to be butchered and served. But even the simple task of short-term refrigeration was problematic: The damn cake was too tall for the Rubbermaid dome that goes with the cake plate. Fuckaroo!

At that point, I declared defeat and retreated from my kitchen. When I pulled the disaster cake out when the time finally came to serve it, the thing was sitting in a small moat of sticky, strawberry-flavored, pale pink ooze, which had also dribbled onto the 'fridge shelf on which it had sat and spilled onto the floor when I removed it from the 'fridge. I shoved seven candles in the damn thing, lit 'em up and started the caterwauling of "Happy Birthday."

By the way, I did warn the boy when I picked him up from school that his cake had not turned out as I'd hoped. He'd kindly assured me that was fine with him. He's not only developing a sense of what to say at awkward times but also how to let some things roll right off his back like water and a duck.

Nevertheless, he seemed quite wary of his disaster birthday cake.

Once hacked into, the cake didn't look too bad. If I can snatch one small victory out of the jaws of this behemouth defeat, I can be proud that the layers didn't fall apart once sliced and even once transferred to a bowl for serving. Hooray for small miracles, eh, Gentle Reader?

The overall taste wasn't too bad either. I mean, it was all right for box cake combined with sugary buttercream frosting and loads of strawberry preserves. And really, I think the disaster cake's appearance in some small away improved once it was vivisected, for now the alternating chocolate and vanilla (well, "white," whatever the hell that cake flavor's supposed to be) layers and hint of red filling gave the cake a bit more contrast. Or at least the alternating layers drew the eye away from the overall shitty appearance of its exterior.

Fortunately, the cake deities did grant me some small reprieve: My in-laws surprised the boy with a dozen Star Wars-themed cupcakes they'd ordered from a local cupcake cafe. Therefore, the boy can eventually look back on his seventh birthday and remember that he had 12 great-looking cakes to enjoy.

Hopefully, the memories of the disaster cake will fade from his mind quickly.
Since it's competing with Star Wars-themed cakey goodness, I'm pretty sure that'll happen.