Birthday Times! Ice Cream and Cake and Cake!

The finished product!  Yellow Cake with Chocolate Sour Cream Frosting

Yummilicious with French vanilla ice cream

On January 3, we celebrated Nathan's 31st birthday!  Some neighbors and friends joined us and though it was bitter cold outside (8 degrees F!) we had a cozy little gathering.

If you want the recipe, it is from an awesome food blog Smitten Kitchen 

I pretty much followed the recipe exactly, except for the cake: I used wheat flour, and organic cane sugar, which created a cornbread-like effect and was very tasty.

Also for the icing what I did differently was omit espresso and used brown rice syrup instead of corn syrup.  It was sort of difficult to spread, but with some elbow-grease it all worked out nicely.

Now for the hilarious part!  So, I have never made a real, from-scratch cake.  I was hell-bent on doing a 9-inch layered cake and this recipe seemed fool-proof, or so I thought...

Cake batter prep went smoothly and looked beautiful.  I popped the pans in the oven and about halfway through baking I smelled something burning.  I ran over to the oven to discover my cakes flowing like lava out of the pans and oozing onto the oven and all over the racks!!!  I quickly slid some baking sheets under to catch the goo.  Sadly, that didn't work and the bits on the bottom caught fire and smoke was billowing out of the oven :(

Thankfully, Nathan saved the day by calmly opening the window, shutting off the oven and helping me pry burnt pieces from the oven.  He reassured me the cakes could be recovered, which I doubted but wanted to believe.

So I set about scraping the pans' edges free of batter, placing sheets under the pans and commencing with part 2 of the baking.  It worked!!!  I was thrilled!  Nathan was thrilled too because the cake kept oozing but eventually formed a nice little mold of cake around the outside of the pans which we were able to eat right away!

If I didn't tell you it happened, there was no way to tell there was a cake mishap!  The only thing I can think that went wrong is that perhaps the pans were 8-inch causing the overflow.  Or maybe my baking soda was too fresh?  I checked and the flour was definitely not self-rising.

Everyone liked it, we had a little adventure making it and I finally succeeded in making a cake from scratch.  Yay!

I'd love to hear about your baking mishaps--do share as it's way more funny after the fact ;)