Dave's Birthday Cake

I’m a terrible baker, and I don’t know why.  I want to be good at baking, and every time I set out to bake something I fully expect that if I follow the recipe it will turn out perfectly.  It never does.

We had a little birthday party for Dave, and this is the cake he ended up with.  It was a weird one.  I attempted to make a dairy-free lemon cake with some raspberry filling.    I followed the instructions completely, but for some reason each layer ended up being only half an inch tall!  I thought about baking two more layers to make it a 4-layer cake, but I didn’t have time.  So I cut the two layers in half, reasoning that I could make it look like a lemon wedge.  That would have been really cute if I’d had some food coloring and some idea about how to make the cake look like a lemon.  I didn’t.  It wouldn’t have mattered anyway, though, because my raspberry filling leaked out and turned all of the icing pink.  It was slippery and made the cake lean to the side.  I then ran out of icing before the sides had even been covered.  Another baking disaster!

Everyone at the party was really nice about the cake, and a couple of people even said it was “beautiful”.  I think that was going overboard just a bit.