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The Spotted Cake From Hell

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The day I’ve had.

So. If you were to search for “spotty cake” You’ll find some fun looking things and right away you’ll find what I was trying to make.
It’s my mum’s birthday tomorrow and I don’t really have anything for her. I put all my efforts into Christmas and had some nice surprises for her (including something that I actually went out and bought myself). As there was a 3 for 2 offer when I bought her Satsuma hand cream and hand sanitiser I was saving the second hand cream for her birthday. But she found that (after Christmas at least) while looking for bows for the family Christmas presents. So that surprise it blown. I think I’ll hold that back for a later date when she’s forgotten about it. Maybe for Mother’s day or next Christmas.

But the only problem with that is that now I don’t have anything for her Birthday. I thought of going out when she’s at work to get something but the weather has been abysmal and I’ve been oversleeping far too much to do it secretly. Also the only things I can think of are things that I rejected for Christmas, either because they weren’t that good or were too complicated.

The best I’ve managed to do is three packets of flying saucers (I would’ve got more but they didn’t have any this week and I couldn’t get too many last week because she’d notice. Although she might have noticed anyway. It’s very hard to be sneaky) and four sherbet fountains which she has fond memories of from childhood and so on I guess. We still have sweets and biscuits and things leftover from Christmas and I also wend a little crazy getting things that were on sale after Christmas. So more sweets is the last thing we need but it’s all I could come up with so that’s that.
I don’t buy/make her birthday cards anymore because I see where they end up and I get disheartened by that and also it’s a lot of effort to make a card. Where they end up is just lying around somewhere and forgotten as soon as the birthday is over. I know that’s how it is for all cards and I accept it. I just don’t like seeing it happen with something that I’ve worked so hard on to make. If the card leaves the house then I don’t see where it ends up and I can forget about it and move on.

So. With all this in mind I had an idea. I could give her a spectacular birthday cake. Hopefully the beauty and difficulty of it will be greatly appreciated in lieu amazing birthday gifts.

I already have a cake pop mould (though I’ve only ever used one half for making sweets) but it’s only an 8 ball mould that I’ve never used properly before.
I got a bag of sponge mix last week and a bunch of different food colouring (It claims to be 3 times more vibrant. Yay)
And this week I got another bag of sponge mix and some decorations.

I planned to……

Ah. How you make the cake is to do some little coloured cake balls (hence the cake pop mould) then pop them in the cake tin in regular sponge cake mix and bake it. Then when it’s all done you cut into it and there are coloured spots inside. The recipe I was following used a readymade sponge cake mix too but didn’t cook the balls as long as instructed because they’re smaller. Fair enough. Fun and simpler than you think. Right?

I planned to bake the balls secretly yesterday (because she wasn’t at work) and do the rest of the cake today (when she was at work).
Of course. The best laid plans of mice and men.

To be completely secret I waited until she went to bed to make the balls. This was a disaster. She slept too long before taking the dog out. So took the dog out late. So went to bed late. So I only had just over an hour to do it. I considered waiting until today and just getting up earlier but, given my recent sleeping habits that wouldn’t work out. So I decided to do them then.

Now I got a particularly cheap sponge mix but it was the only vanilla cake mix they had so I had no choice in the matter. I’ve used it before and it’s fine if you do a normal cake. Has questionable results when you try to get fancy but that may just be a lack of technical skill rather than the mix itself.

So I mixed it all up as best as I could using a spoon (because no one wants to hear the electric mixer at 5am. It’s a particularly loud one too) separated it onto seven (because I ended up with one of every colour because I had purple left over from Halloween) So it should be a lot of fun. First problem. I had to make sure the cake pop mould was clean. Not a problem just an inconvenience, as is the fact that I didn’t have any “cake release spray” which is just spray grease. I had a squirty sunflower oil (it’s a cheaply constructed disperser so it squirts rather than sprays and loses pressure after about three presses) but good enough.
First actual problem. The food colouring isn’t vibrant enough. Five drops in a little bowl of cake mix. I considered having apstel colours because I originally planned on decorating the cake with flying saucers so it would be cute but being baked into a vanilla sponge it wouldn’t be impressive enough in pale colours. So if five drops doesn’t do it how about another five? Better but could be brighter. Maybe double that. 20 drops. Not as vibrant as the one in the video but she was using a fancier food colouring so this is fine. I think it looks rather nice.

Onto the next problem.
I only have an 8 ball mould. So I only get to do two colours at a time. Fair enough. I put it in the oven, for less time than required like she did in the video. Yay it’s cooked.
Third problem.
No. It’s not cooked. The ones on the outside are cooked. The ones in the middle are half cooked. Okay. Put them in for a few more minutes. By the way it is not smart trying to get them out of the mould when it’s fresh from the oven. Maybe this will take a little longer than I thought. A few minutes later still not cooked. Okay let’s do another five minutes. Better. But still not cooked in the middle. In the end I salvaged what I could and got on with the nest one.
Again hot mould even though it’s silicone and not metal (which in my mind means it shouldn’t be as hot for as long) is not cool enough to handle straight out of the oven and does not cool down that quickly either. Good to know.

So then the next colour. Again some under cooking going on. Maybe my balls are a bit bigger than the ones in the video? It’s hard to gauge size. Or maybe it’s the mix I’m using. Either way I follow the cooking times for the next batch and it works beautifully. I also stop trying to spread the oil evenly using a kitchen towel because they’re sticking to the mould, then again that might be prevented if I just let them cool first but I don’t have time. They can cool while I cook the next ones.

The next problem. I taste a little of the offcut cake. It tastes like crap. Is it the sponge mix? Possibly. It’s not super sweet but let’s not forget I put in 20 “drops” of gel food colouring. And I say “drops” because it’s hard to gauge a drop with something that’s not actually liquid. This is a problem. You don’t want a super pretty cake that tastes disgusting. And the way I’m going here it’s not going to be a very pretty cake. So for the last two or so batches I put a drop or two (because doing just one drop is hard with the size and shape of this bottle) into the remaining bowls of cake mix and tasting those offcuts was considerably better.

The next problem. Not only is mum up but she has now come downstairs. It’s obvious what I’m doing even though I completely ban her from the kitchen and bring her breakfast to her. She has things to be doing anyway but the fact that I keep having to get up and got back into the kitchen several times is obvious that this isn’t a regular cake. Though I doubt she has any clue what kind of cake it is.

She goes off to work and I finally finish baking my balls. At last. It’s around 9am at this point.
Then I think to myself. I’ll probably sleep in too late at this point. And as I’m here why not finish the cake? Then I just have to decorate when I get up.
And while I wait for that to cook I can try to fix the hole in my snuggle socks with that iron glue tape stuff. I didn’t know if it would work but I wanted to try because one of them has a hole worn in it So sewing it wouldn’t work. My feet have been very cold because I haven’t been wearing them and now I think the chilblains are back as a result. *Sigh*

So I mixed up the second bag of cake mix. Put it in the tin with the balls. I only put in a couple but it only went half way up so I stuffed them all in and hoped the cake would rise enough to cover them.

So while I waited for that to cook I got on with my other project. Now it was fiddlier than I thought but I shouldn’t have been surprised. I messed up a lot but it’s understandable as it’s the first time I’ve used it. The only real problem was that I burnt my finder on the edge of the iron for a second. Rather than rushing to the kitchen and running it under the tap I instinctively put it in my mouth instead. It seems okay for now but if it starts itching I must remember why. It’s my first injury ironing anything because I’ve never done ironing. Well, I’ve ironed napkins to card to make cards but rarely. When we got the Christmas tree we also got a nice little table top ironing board. So now I can use the iron more for projects. We have an ironing board but it’s currently being used as a table for random junk in my mum’s room, since we stopped using it as much then eventually stopped using it altogether. But once in a while we need/would like to use the iron for something but it’s not worth clearing the ironing board for. And this little one being so small and light means I can put it on my desk for projects (as long as I move one speaker and my mouse mat and have it hanging off the edge of the desk just a little.)

Then I got the cake out of the oven. Let that cool. It sank a little in the middle but that was okay. I used two cake tins and cooked them side by side in the oven. I’m not used to doing that which explains what happened next.

I forgot to get icing but I have icing sugar if all else fails but I also have decorating icing that I got to do gingerbread which I didn’t ice in the end. I didn’t get a filling either. But I figured I could use the mixed fruit jam she likes.

I got the cakes out of the tins. Cut the tops off for a flat surface. Then I noticed they were sticky in the middle. But I thought never mind and spread the jam and put them together. then changed my mind and decided to cook them a little more but they were jammed together at this point. What to do.
So I put the cake under a medium grill for a bit and it came out quite nice, a little dark at the edges but not burnt. It seemed to be a bit more solid too. So I turned it over and did the other side……and forgot it was under the grill.
I arrived to find the cake smoking.
I got it out and it wasn’t too bad. Just a thin layer of burnt crustiness. I cut that off, so now it’s not flat anymore, but it’s okay. But I wonder if it’s cooked in the very middle.
But this was about 11:30am at this point.
I wrapped the cake in foil and hid it in the oven (in case I slept through and she came home before I could hide it) we don’t have anything to oven cook this week so the oven should be a pretty safe hiding spot.

I wondered if microwaving the cake would cook the middle. Since I’m under the impression (because that’s what I’ve been told in the past) that a microwave works opposite to and oven (for example). The oven heats from the outside in and the microwave heats from the inside out. So if the middle of the cake is undercooked then and the oven will burn it, then the microwave might cook the middle and leave the rest unburnt. But I was too tired to deal with that at the time.

So when I got up, at 5pm, the first thing I did, when I got downstairs, was put the cake in the microwave. I thought about looking it up first to see if it was safe but figured there are microwave cake recipes so it should be fine.

I wanted this to be cooked properly because I figure we’d have leftover cake (as mum’s not that into sweets and I’m trying to veer off of sweets because the the crap I eat is making me feel a little sick these days so I can’t eat it as much) so mum would probably take the leftover cake to work. And such a surprising and pretty cake is the sort of thing you’d want to show off. In theory.

So for a minute at a time I microwaved it on both sides a few times. It seemed to have cooked more but I don’t know if it’s cooked all the way through and some of the jam oozed out of the middle, so that’ll be interesting. But now the cake was hot and I needed to let it cool before I could ice it. Then I heard mum coming home. So I hid the cake in the oven and thought about how to start this hilarious story about this cake from hell and I’ve been at this about three hours mostly but with a breakfast break, half way through.

So I’ll let you know how it works out.

Oh I was going to explain what flying saucers are but I’ll save that for later.

A quick follow up. Now it’s cooled right down it feels a bit denser. Not sure if that’s down to the microwave or because it’s completely cold now. I’ve iced it, had just enough icing to cover the top, not the neatest job but it’ll do. One more thing to make me thing this venture is cursed is that when I opened the bag of icing (having put it in warm water and kneaded it to soften it as instructed) I was squeezing it gently and looking into it to both know when it was about to come out and see what kind of consistency it had. At first nothing. Then suddenly it shot a little plug of in-softened icing into my eye. Luckily, I wear glasses so it didn’t go in my eye, just splattered on the lens. That could’ve been disastrous if I didn’t have glasses. I spent about an hour icing and decorating it. I think it looks pretty darn nice. Kind of looks like it would be more at home at a five-year olds birthday party but never mind.

Updated 01-19-2018 at 08:59 PM by Bluebiird

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Comments

  1. Virgil's Avatar
    How did it taste? Microwaves don't technically cook from the inside out. The way it works is that it sends frequency like radio waves only stronger, more like a radar actually, into the food and the waves excite the moisture inside the food so much so that it heats up. So the heat is not from the center of the food out, but from wherever the moisture is, which is probably spread evenly throughout. So I guess that is technically cooking from the inside, but not necessarily the center out. Hope that makes sense. Hope your mom had a great birthday.