The Baking of a Birthday Cake

I can't just leave well enough alone.

So the recipe called for a jar of caramel sauce. Do you know what's in jarred caramel sauce? Corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, and artificial flavoring. No, thanks. Especially not when I'm going to all the trouble of grinding and sifting flour from organic white wheat berries. Especially not when I'll use sucanat instead of white sugar even though it doesn't get as fluffy.

The author of the recipe commented that if you didn't have jarred caramel sauce on hand, you could simply melt a cup of sugar and use that. Stir until it liquifies, she said. Well, Levi wanted to help, so I set him at the stove (it was on low heat and I was within reach at all times; nobody panic), standing on a chair, stirring slowly with a plastic mixing spoon. I took over when it started to clump, but it wasn't until the sugar was completely liquid that I realized the tip of the spoon was missing, and there were flakes of plastic streaking the otherwise-lovely caramel sauce.

Can you see them?

I mentally chided my idiocy and set about making a second batch. In hindsight -- and with the sounds of my sweet husband scraping hard-candy-stage caramel off the bottom of my saucepan in the background -- I should've rinsed the first pan out right away. But I didn't. That's solid as glass, up there in that picture. Plastic-flecked, caramel-flavored glass.

I started over, but this time I wasn't paying quite as close attention, and I let it heat too long. It didn't quite burn, thankfully, but the instant I took it off the heat, it crystallized. I scraped as much as I could into the bowl of cake batter, intending to mix it in as the recipe stated, but there was no way this stuff was going to blend nicely. In the end, I sprinkled chunks of almost-hard caramel into the cake pan and prayed that they would melt just enough while it baked.

Of course, some of it had solidified to the bottom of the pot already. My poor husband.

The cake came out half an hour later looking and smelling quite lovely, despite the effort it had taken to get it in the oven. I had greased and floured the cake pan quite thoroughly, so I felt sure it would slide smoothly out onto the cooling rack, but I hadn't taken into account the glue-like properties of over-cooked caramel. Approximately 2/3 of the cake slid smoothly out of the pan. 

This is after I used a nylon scraper to pry up (and eat, mostly) the huge chunks of cake left behind where the caramel stuck to the pan.

After wrestling a bit with the icing -- it took considerably more powdered sugar than the recipe stated -- I glued some of the cake chunks (the ones I hadn't eaten) back to the bottom of the cake. It propped it up just enough to sit flat on a plate (it would have listed for sure, with nearly a third of the bottom missing). Once I added the toffee bits to the icing and covered the cake, it actually didn't look too bad, from this side:

But if you look at the other side of the plate . . . 

I plan to serve the leftovers to visiting friends this weekend, so we made sure to eat the falling-apart side tonight. With that particular wedge removed, and all but one of the caramel-covered pans free from debris, you'd never know what a disaster it was.

Except, of course, that I just wrote it down for you all to read. :)

Oh, I almost forgot: it actually tasted quite good! The chunks of caramel were perhaps crunchier than you'd normally expect inside of a cake, but since the toffee-laced icing is crunchy as well, it's not so noticeable. A pleasant toffee-caramel crunch in every bite. Two thumbs up!

Or maybe one and a half. You'd probably need to use jarred caramel sauce to get both thumbs all the way up.