Monday, August 13, 2012

Cake in a pot

Yesterday I had my birthday party.  It was a grand event with a huge collection of old friends, notably a bunch of folks who have mostly been geographically challenged in recent years, and although my condo was quite overwhelmed by the number of guests we had a good time.  In preparation for my party Wendy asked me what sort of birthday cake I would like.  As has been my habit over the past few years I asked for Aunt Wilma Cake, a lemon and raisin concoction that my mother used to make in my younger days.

The thing about Aunt Wilma Cake is that you bake it in a mold and then pop it out so it can look all nice and presentable like.  The trouble with Aunt Wilma Cake is that sometimes you have incompetent people taking the cake out of the mold and things don't go quite as planned.  I pulled the cake out of the oven and tried to get it out of the mold.  It resisted strenuously and the mold sat on the counter as I thumped on it.  Not to be denied I pried all edges of the cake off of the mold and tried the upside down thumping again.  Unfortunately instead of a nice, shapely cake popping cleanly out of the mold I got a rain of shattered cake chunks all over the counter and a bunch of cake thoroughly stuck to the mold.

Undaunted I scraped the cake out of the mold and then hesitated, unsure of how exactly to handle the storage and preservation of a collection of disparate bits of cake that formerly were a single unit.  I needed a container, with decent size sides, and probably a lid since I wanted the cake to last until the next day for the party.  My solution:  Put the cake in a pot, of course!  Most likely I won't be asked to take a cake out of the oven again; despite that each step of my solution seemed logical I didn't really end up where I was supposed to.


This was the birthday cake served to my guests at my party.  It tasted great and I was very much pleased with the whole fiasco (it got me a great story to tell) but I think Wendy feels embarrassed since she was the one baking the thing.  It bothers me not at all and I think the guests by now simply must be inured to the lack of ceremony and presentation that is present in all I do.  If you can't handle birthday cakes being served out of a pot with a soup ladle then you aren't going to fit into the rest of my life anyway.

2 comments:

  1. Are you sure the problem was incompetence? If so, I suffer from it too. It think it has to do with the raisins settling to the bottom in a kind of layer, which likes to pull apart when inverted. You can grease the pan then dust it with flour. You can also stir the raisins in flour before adding them to the cake. Or you can do what I usually do - carefully scrape the residue out of the pan and pat it back into place on the cake. Once cooled, it is almost stuck there and looking nearly fine. :)

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  2. My cake came out of the mold utterly destroyed; there was no solid piece bigger than a nectarine. If it had been only somewhat destroyed I would have attempted to reassemble it but it more resembled a pile of crumbs than a cake.

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