The Sweet and Salty Cake.
It had lots going for it. 1)Fancy salt on top! 2)Chocolate 3)Caramel! I've never worked with caramel, I could learn something new! and 4)Fancy salt on top! Did I mention the salt?? I love fancy salt!! Chocolate covered pretzels are a personal favorite, and this seemed sort of like a layer cake version of that. Yes, I thought to myself, this is totally a Mrs. Lyons cake. I was all over the Sweet and Salty Cake.
After making it though, that's not what I would name it. I'd call it Seemed-Like-A-Good-Idea-at-the-Time Cake, or The Carmel Chocolate Cake of DOOM, or the How-to-Look-Like-You've-Never-Baked-a-Cake-Before-INYOURENTIRELIFE Cake.
Of course our Tale of Woe continues... I decided to attempt this miserable confection to... why else? Impress my friends. Ha. I should have known that it would all go horribly wrong when I was at the grocery store buying all my supplies for the cake and dinner party when a rather rude woman decided to not only make inappropriate comments to me about how full my shopping cart was (srsly? I'm at the grocery store. People go there to buy food, Lady.) but also CUT IN LINE in front of someone else to make these nasty comments. She decided that she couldn't wait for the checker to finish with me, so she ran, no joke, to the back of the store... only to stand in line back there. She stared at me the whole time, aaaaall the way on the other side of the store, and walked out of the store a whopping 5 seconds before I did.
Of course the checker, the girl behind me and I all snickered about her as soon as she was out of ear shot. Hey, she deserves it. But really, I should have known my carefully laid plans for A Perfect Dinner were doomed... first, random rude people. Always a bad omen. Then, the checker expressed a number to me regarding my groceries that was, roughly, twice as much as I was expecting him to politely utter in public. The last straw was me meticulously following the directions while baking and assembling the cake, the whole time ignoring the voice in my head screaming: IT'S NOT A GOOD IDEA TO DO IT THAT WAY. IT WILL NOT WORK, AND YOU KNOW IT.
Why did I ignore that voice? Well, like most people Mrs. Lyons has low self-esteem and lives for compliments,* and is also a not-very-reformed perfectionist.** So I followed the directions, even when I knew not to, so I wouldn't mess it up.
And I messed it up. I messed it up bad. And I know you wanna see it too, don't cha?
Notice the skewers in the top? I stuck those in there to stop the layers from sliding, then tried to break the tops off with my bare hands in a fit of rage when I realized they were too tall to fit in my fridge. The Man, sensible as ever, neatly trimmed them. I didn't think the cake deserved such kind treatment.
Luckily for me, my friends are awesome and drooled at the sight of it. That of course, totally cracked me up. I realated my sob story about making it to them... but seriously I don't think they were listening because I don't think they took their eyes off the cake the entire time I was talking, even when I used bad words really loud. (I was pretty upset over this cake.)
I said that in order to offset all the upset this cake caused me that we were all going to eat it with our bare hands (washed, of course!! *shudder*) once we were all good and drunk.***
layers of caramel and caramel-dark-chocolate-ganache
But you know what happened? I used a knife (surprise, surprise) and the cake tasted AWESOME. Oh, it was SO. GOOD. Really good. It was a pain in the Alicia to make, assemble and serve, but I might try it again. Maybe if I got good and drunk first this time.
So, what would I do differently next time? Listen to that voice and CHILL, CHILL, CHILL everything. The cakes should be chilled. The frosting should be chilled. In between steps, everything should be chilled. And the whole caramel deal? Well, I made it without any issues, but I'm not sure how exactly to make it work in between cake layers. The recipe said it will "soak in a bit" but that didn't happen. At all. (and none of it was chilled) So when it came time to start stacking that baby up, everything oozed and slid. Oh, how I cried.
and what a delicious mess it was!!
Just for fun, how about if we talk for a second about what exactly is IN this cake?
- a whole box of butter. At least.
- heavy cream
- sour cream
- evil of all evils: CORN SYRUP
- 1 lb. of dark chocolate
- 4 1/2 whopping cups of sugar
*not really.
**the funniest part is that I generally mess everything up, somehow, so can I really call myself a perfectionist? Most likely I'm just neurotic, *sigh*
*** yeah, Mrs. Lyons doesn't really drink, so my friends just got drunk and I watched. Amusing.
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