The Great Cake Disaster of 2013

A few weeks ago, my friend Megan posted pictures of a "rainbow cake" that she made for her boys and it turned out so beautifully, I decided to try it myself. It's actually a kit called "Tie-Dye Cake" which I bought at Target. It involved separating the batter into 6 bowls and applying food color to each bowl to get six different colors. Then you pour the colored batter into your pans one color at a time, and somehow the batter magically separates out by color.

So far, so good. However, when I got to the blue batter, I accidentally splattered it across the different colors in the pan on the right. To try to fix the mistake, I started swirling the colors around with a knife and the pattern actually came out pretty cool.

 

So I baked the cakes and oddly enough, the circular patterned one didn't rise very much but the hippie patterned one rose beautifully even though they had the exact same batter, were cooked in the exact same oven, and were sitting side by side on the same rack. Go figure.

As I was cooling the cakes, Tom saw them and asked if he could have a piece 'to go' on his way to the Redskins to work. The box said to cool completely for 30 minutes in the pans before removing but they'd only cooled for about 10. I tried to remove them anyway so he could have a piece and well...

 

 

...half of both cakes stuck to the pans and crumbled into a million pieces. I removed the other halves and put frosting on them and then tried to piece the rest together to form the circular shape of a cake. It was truly hideous but the boys thought it was beautiful and at least it did taste really good. I used Pam cooking spray on the pans before adding the batter but next time, I'm going to go the old-fashioned route and use Crisco and lots and lots of flour. And nobody's getting a slice until the pans are completely cooled!!!