The Ugliest Cake Ever

It started out innocently enough.  I decided at the last minute that I wanted to bake my husband a birthday cake.  No big deal, right?  Well, then some stipulations were made.  I had just made a chocolate-peanut butter dessert three days ago, so I wanted to avoid that combo, which happens to be Andrew's favorite.  It had to be cake (I don't know why!) so I didn't make gingerbread men (his second favorite).  And it had to be something I had in my pantry, since it was snowing like crazy and I didn't want to go to the store, and it was already the day of his birthday when I decided to make the cake.  Let's just say...all these stipulations?  They're the stuff disasters are made of.

I had a Triple Fudge cake mix, so I decided to start there.  After searching around on the Betty Crocker website for a while, I found this recipe.  A layer of cake, then fudge, then more cake?  Yes please!  The only difference I made was that I forgot to reserve one cup of the crumbly cake mix, instead mixing it all together with the applesauce and eggs.  This worked out okay, though if I had created the crumbly layer, I wouldn't have tried to make a layered cake, and none of the following would have happened.

I cut the cake in half while it was still in the 13x9.  My intention was to stack it on a cake stand and make a square layered cake.  When I put the first half on the cake stand, it was a little too large, and it broke.  For some inexplicable reason, I tried the other half, and wouldn't you know, being the same size as the first half, it broke too.  So there I was with four broken pieces of a cake that I had just made.

After some consideration, I opted to cut the two larger pieces into circles, and the two smaller pieces into half circles.  I stacked the three circles on top of one another, then made this icing and poured it over the top.  It was delicious...but ugly.  Like, really ugly.  This is definitely the most hideous cake I have ever made.

I will totally understand if one of you submits this to Cake Wrecks.  Luckily, the cake was delicious, the frosting was yummy, and we ate almost all of it.  I saved the off-cuts from the circles for snacking!  Anyway, the reason I showed you all this cake is because I promised when I started this blog I would share my disasters.  There haven't been too many lately, save for putting my fingers through the electric mixer, but this was too horrifying not to share!

Happy Birthday Andrew!