Ask not what your cake can do for you ...

So, this past weekend the fam gathered at my parent's house for a low-key early birthday celebration for my mom. Like usual, I offered to make the cake, and my mom requested the rich vegan chocolate cake that I've made many times before. When I made it for my dad's birthday in October I layered the cake with a rich chocolate frosting and topped it with peaks of (definitely not vegan) fluffy white icing and dark chocolate shavings. It was beautiful and delicious--a winning combination, if I do say so myself. So I was planning basically the same thing for my mom. Easy, right? Nope. I think my kitchen may have been cursed over the weekend, because nothing went right. I divided the batter between two round pans and baked them until they were perfectly done. I let them cool for a bit (too long, I'm afraid) and when I went to remove them from the pans, they both completely fell apart. Each cake was broken and crumbled in bits. "Oh, well," I thought. "I still have time to whip up another cake, some filling and the frosting. No big deal." So I bagged up the ruined cake scraps and stuck them in the freezer for snacking on (they still tasted delicious), and went to work on my second cake. This one would be a simple 8-inch square, no layers, with a basic vegan frosting. But this time since it was only one cake, it must have been to thick for my crappy oven to properly bake. The top burnt and the bottom was still all gooey when I finally took it out of the oven. That one did not taste so good, and into the garbage it went. In the mean time, I was trying to boil the icing in a makeshift double-boiler. After an hour of so of the frosting not thickening up like it was supposed to I just gave up and decided we would buy my mom a pretty vegan cake from The Wedge. But alas, they had no vegan cakes that looked good, so we ended up with a pretty little white layer cake with butter cream frosting (for twenty bucks!). I did not enjoy it and I think the rest of the family enjoyed it only slightly more than I, except for Chris, who couldn't even try it because of the dairy in it. I learned an important lesson that night: Next time, just throw all the crumbs in a bowl and cover them with frosting--as long as it tastes good, my family couldn't care less what it looks like! As a side note, since my parents hadn't bothered to take down the Christmas tree, we were able to take our annual "aly and kev in front of the tree" photo, which somehow eluded us over the holidays.