I visited my best friend, Melissa, and her fiancé, Ben, November 7-8 in Jacksonville to celebrate Ben’s belated birthday and Melissa’s first weekend off in months. The following photos chronicle the Cake Saga.
Melissa ices the scary cake.
You see, their oven is lopsided or something and she made a chocolate layer cake — a round one. And the batter seemed to all flow to one side of the pan and both layers were lopsided. One was so lopsided that one side of it was only about a quarter of an inch thick.
Ben slips in to steal some frosting for himself. He was upset because he didn't get any candles.
So, she flipped one over on top of the other to try to even it out and then ice it together, with the icing working as a kind of glue. But the cake (It’s alive!!!) starting moving around, with the top kind of trying to slide off. But the weird thing was that it as sliding uphill instead of down.
The wooden stake in the middle was supposed to keep the layers together, like restaurants do with toothpicks for sandwiches. It didn't work, except to help us gauge just how far the layers had slipped apart.
The end of the story is that we ate some of it and Melissa put it in the microwave overnight so the dog wouldn’t get to it. When we pulled it out after lunch on Sunday, the cake had slipped and slid all over itself and split into three parts. We think it was trying to escape the microwave and kill us in our sleep.
The finished product. You can see how much it moved and in what direction by the angle of the stake.
UPDATE (3-4-10): I mentioned the candles to Ben last weekend. He didn’t remember. I guess he wasn’t all that upset.
An Unexplored Wilderness 
That cake looks good. Stopped in from SITS! Have a great Saturday.
It tasted great!
too much humidity.
hey, my cakes always turn out lopsided, must be something about Geminis and baking cakes, how much you wanna bet?
Interesting story.
But if your friend wants to avoid them in the future (it took me years to figure out how) tell her she can buy quilted strips of cloth you soak in water and pin around the outside of the pans before you bake the cake. It keeps the moisture even so the inside of the cake gets done the same time as the outside and the top stays flat. This is what usually causes it to break into several pieces. If not, shave a bit of the crown off the middle so the bottom layer is flat, just make sure to place the shaved side down on the plate so the icing doesn’t soak in and make it soggy.)
Also, make the icing thicker between the layers and thinner for the outside frosting.
And most stoves have leveling feet that screw up or down.
As you can tell, I’ve had a lot of baking disasters.
Would those work on silicon baking pans? That’s what she has.
And I’m not sure if the stove itself is uneven or if the house lists. I’ll pass this along, though.