citizen of the planet

Eh, what a mess. With plans to visit my parents today I decided to make a cake. It just so happened that the last time I made a black forest cake they didn’t get to try it so I decided to attempt to do that. The recipe for devil’s food cake I have in my book from George Brown produces two cakes, so I had to cut the quantities in half. All was well until I got to an ingredient that I didn’t have on hand. Without milk powder, I had to make a substitution for real milk. Generally the ratio of milk powder and water is about 1 to 4. The book called for 40g of milk powder. So, to replace 40g of milk powder you’d also remove 160mL (water is 1g to 1mL) of water and replace both with 160mL of milk. I mixed it all according to plan. The batter was actually rather smooth. I was kind of shocked. I poured it into the cake pan and put it into the oven. It’s supposed to bake for about 30-40 minutes. By the end of that time i checked the oven but it wasn’t ready. It actually took another half an hour or so before I decided to take it out. After letting it cool I took it out of the pan to discover that it didn’t rise as much as I had hoped. I found it strange but I pushed forward anyway. I took out my serrated knife and started cutting it into layers. Since the cake didn’t rise much the layers were pretty thin. The cake was ridiculously moist and fudgy. Well, I had to find places to lay the layers. I put one on a cookie sheet which was rested on a ledge. That…was a mistake. The cookie sheet tipped over and the layer landed on the floor. The cake crumbled into a heap of stuff on the floor. Well, with only two thin layers I decided to just restart.

I started again and quickly put everything together just like I had done last time. It wasn’t until after I had mixed in the milk that I had realized my error. I had converted the missing milk powder correctly but I forgot to cut the quantity in half. I was using way more liquid than I needed. Well, with the milk already incorporated I figured that if I add a bit more flour everything would balance out. There was an open plastic bag of what I thought was cake flour. I added a handful or two of that to the mix. It wasn’t until after that I realized that the bag contained baking powder and not cake flour. Of course, baking powder is a leavening agent, and with a heck of a lot more of that in there I expected the cake to sort of explode. I tossed in some proper cake flour like I planned and just hoped for the best.

I plopped the cake pan in the oven and waited patiently in my room. After about 30 minutes or so I started smelling something burning. I went to the oven and saw that the cake had indeed risen well above the cake pan. It wasn’t quite as bad as I had hoped though. I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, though I did continue to smell something burning. Upon further inspection I saw that the other side of the cake pan did indeed overflow. The batter had spilled onto the bottom of the oven and formed a pile. It looked as if the cake had taken a shit right at the bottom of the oven. The cake dump was starting to smoke. I had to shut off the breaker to the smoke detector. At that point it was already well beyond midnight. I didn’t want to set the thing off. I opened the patio door, turned on as many fans as I could and started venting the oven. I took the cake out, and managed to get the cake dump off the floor of the oven. It so happens that my smoke detector is on the same breaker switch as my bathroom circuitry. I wanted to turn on the bathroom light, but when I did my smoke detector went off. In order to not have it go off at 1 a.m. I had to keep that switch off. So yes, peeing in the dark is about the culmination of a night of bad baking. I have to metaphorically flush this cake turd and move on. Can’t always rock it, right?