Melting Snow

Wildcard Thursday: Layer Cake Humor

Thursday, March 2, 2017

"The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for 30 years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found."

Calvin Trillin

The "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  The Wildcard Round prompt
Tell us about a time that you failed hilariously at something.

What To Do With Leftover Burnt Cake

"Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye.
Four and twenty blackbirds,
Baked in a pie."1

To set the record straight it wasn't a pie I was baking, but a three layer cake. I also don't put black birds or any other type of meat in it. I think I did put chocolate in one or all three of the layers. I think this was the first time I attempted to bake a layer cake, so I suppose I should have expected something to go wrong. I thought I covered that possibility by using a cake mix instead of baking it from scratch.

I greased and floured the layer cake pans, I mixed the cake (being overly cautions about the liquid ingredients) and poured the mix into the pans. I did as my grandmother taught me and made sure there were no air bubbles in the layers. I put the filled cake pans in the preheated oven. I thought I turned the timer on, but since I never heard it sound the timer was either broken or I didn't set the time. An hour or so later I smelled burning cake. I took the layers out of the oven (being careful to use a potholder), set them on top of the stove and stared blankly into the space above the gas range.

After contemplating the situation for a few minutes, I decided the best thing to do would be to hide the evidence. Therefore, I removed the burnt cake layers from their pans, put the cake pans to soak, wrapped the layers in Reynolds Wrap and placed them at the bottom of deep freeze located in the spare room. I removed the cake layers several months later, soaked them in water and fed them to the chickens. I suppose I could have fed them too the chickens immediately after they cooled; however, I never thought about that option at the time.

Footnotes
1  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sing_a_Song_of_Sixpence