My First Cake Fail

Well, it happened this week! My first cake fail!

Evan was sick Monday and Tuesday. I didn’t do anything in preparing for Jenny’s cake (Josh wanted a Super Mario Cake) those two days. I planned on starting on Thursday, which is very unlike me. Because I truly believe in Murphy’s law and I am little bit of a perfectionist, I always have a cake ready by Thursday night. Just in case something happens that I need that extra day and a half. So starting it on Thursday, I knew that I wouldn’t be finished with the cake until Friday evening. But under the circumstances, I didn’t have a choice. Can’t control illnesses, although I wish I could.

Thursday morning, Evan woke up with a horrible cough. I didn’t think too much about it, just hoping he could fight off ANOTHER illness. We went about our business as usual, ice skating lessons, hanging out at Babci’s house.

I was able to make the cake Thursday night. It came out beautiful!! My first sheet cake and I was super impressed how nice it came out and knock on wood, it only took one try! It was perfectly baked and level!

But then, it went down hill from there. Evan woke up with a 102 temperature Friday morning and was quite ill. Carter seemed to be catching the bug also, but didn’t have a temperature just green goobies coming out of his eyes and nose. Nice, huh?

So I was bleaching non-stop all day long, I waited to ice the cake until both boys were napping so that I didn’t have any little boys coughing all over the cake. I iced it and it wasn’t the best icing job, but I knew I was covering the cake with Super Mario characters, so I wasn’t too concerned.

I covered the cake up and put it away safely until after the boys bed time.

When Jeremy came home Friday evening, I used that time to mix all of the icings for the characters.

When the boys finally went down, I picked up the cake and the WHOLE thing started cracking. The icing just started coming off the cake and following apart. It looked like a slab of marble.

Okay, now I am freaking out! Because it is already 10 o’clock on Friday night, I don’t have any ingredients, I don’t have time to bake another cake and allow it to cool, unless I wanted to stay up until 3 am which Evan was up all night long anyway, so really I probably could have.

I had to make a stressful decision. I texted Jenny and warned her that there might be a cake tragedy but I was going to try to scrape off all the icing and try icing it one more time. But I new that if this didn’t work I would have to text her back and admit failure. I just couldn’t pull an all nighter with 2 sick kids and myself fighting off the same bug.

I scraped off all the icing and chunks of cake come off with it, which I have never experienced before. The cake itself started to crumble and some of the icing was glued on the cake and wouldn’t come off. It was horrible. I tried to crumb coat it again and then re-ice it. Needless to say, it didn’t work. Pieces of cake mixed in with the icing. The icing was hardening again like it did the first time.

So I made the difficult decision to cancel the cake with Jenny. She was a gem! At least she let me think she wasn’t stressed about it. She already knew of the stress of the kids being sick all week and we had even discussed me not doing the cake at all. But thankfully she didn’t disown me as a friend, because really I don’t know what I would do without my Jenny !