Birthday Cake

Now the truth can be told. I once again had a mishap with my wife's birthday cake.

Despite the many good birthday cakes I've made for Karen, the ones that are remembered are the disasters, perhaps most famously the chocolate cake with a marshmallowy seven-minute icing. While stored in the fridge overnight, the icing (which perhaps hadn't set up properly during its seven minutes of whipping) melted. Holding the final result, the cake dome was like a bakery aquarium, with chocolate cake layers wallowing amid a sea of white goo.

I decided this year to rely on tried-and-true Best Birthday Cake from Lora Brody's Chocolate American Style. I've been making this cake as a three-layer event, but this time followed the recipe and made two deep layers that would be split to make four layers of cake.

Although I've made this cake a number of times, the bad birthday mojo struck. When I took the cake layers out of the oven, one collapsed entirely, and the other crumbled a bit coming out of the pan. Not happy.

What to do? Frosting corrects a multitude of sins, and this cake has a great white chocolate-cream cheese frosting. I patched it up, put some sprinkles on the outside and on top, and all was fine.

From now on, this is a three-layer cake.