Cake fail.

My cake stand arrived! I love it oh so much. It has a cheery green base and shiny silver top and it rotates like nobody's business. We were tempted to sit Lily on it and spin her around, but resisted. Maybe I'll try it on the cat later. 

I found an interesting cake recipe last week, but I have been putting off making it because I wanted to decorate it on the stand. I had it all planned out: two layers of chocolate cake with a vanilla hazelnut filling, finished with white vanilla icing and light blue piping. Sounds delicious right? 

Lily was very obliging this morning and slept in by herself for a couple of hours after I got up. I excitedly mixed together all the ingredients for two 9 inch round cakes, popped them in the oven and waited for magic. Because I had two cakes in the oven at the same time, they took a couple of extra minutes to bake through. When they were done, I took them out of the oven and promptly forgot everything I know about cakes. Maybe it's because it wasn't explicitly written in the instructions combined with the uncertainties of a new recipe, but I did the stupidest thing I've ever done while baking. I turned the cakes out onto a cooling rack. Immediately. I'll wait for you to stop laughing...

If you're not a baker, let me explain. If you don't let the cake sit and cool for a bit and you try to turn it out it ceases to be a cake. It becomes a pile of crumbs. (See picture below.) And I was idiot enough to do it to BOTH of them. You would think that maybe after the first one ended up looking like a pile of dirt I would have stopped a minute and thought, "Hmmm, what am I doing wrong?" Nope. I charged ahead thinking the first one was just a fluke. So I now have two piles of cake bits cooling in my kitchen. So dumb. 

The good news is, the cake bits are delicious. And I can freeze them for adding to random desserts. I see some chocolate cake milk shakes in my future. The other one isn't quite as bad so I might try to cobble it together to see if I can get anything that resembles a cake out of it. I still can't believe I was that much of a flake. Oh well, hopefully I'll remember next time.