What you see above is the cookbook picture of what I spent most of this afternoon trying to make. Here is the story:
The recipe is Orange Marmalade cake, from the
Mitford books by Jan Karon. My mom found a cookbook at the library full of foods from the books. She said that this cake is one the better known deserts from the series, so of course I had to make it. It looks great, doesn't it?
Everything started out fine. I was painstakingly careful about everything. But it wasn't to last. It was after I added and mixed in 1 cup of oil that I realized that I should have added only
2/3 of a cup! Mom said that it wouldn't make
that huge difference, and I wasn't about to waste all of the ingredients I had already used, so I carried on.
Here we have the batter again, in all its raw egg, salmonella-infested glory! :)
Here's the frosting. For some reason it wasn't getting stiffer, so I just let the mixer go for a few minutes. When I came back, it was looking dangerously near to the state of butter (heavy whipping cream!), but I saved it in time, thankfully!
Okay, so the batter is tolerable and the frosting will do. But what about the baking of the cakes? I greased two 9-inch round pans, laboriously cut out two wax paper circles for them, and greased everything again. It's miserable to have the cake stick to the pan, so I wasn't taking any chances. I filled the pans, put them in to the oven and set the timer. There, that's all good, I thought. But when I checked the recipe, it said that I needed to divide the batter among
three 9- inch pans! Noooo! The pans had looked a little on the very full side when I was filling them, but I told myself that it was fine. The cakes had been in the oven for a while at that point, so I just resigned my self to cake-encrusted oven and got over that, too. You can see them starting to overflow above. Sorry that it's blurry, I took it in a hurry.
This what the oven looked like.
Mom suggested just putting the finished cakes in a bowl, because of the extra oil would probably make them...not what they are supposed to be. So into the bowl they went, I spread the marmalade between the layers, poured the orange syrup over them, finished with the frosting, and here is what I ended up with! Not much like the lovely example in the cookbook, huh? It's more of a trifle-dessert than a cake.
Does it taste good? I don't think so. But my parents were nice and said it was fine. It must be hard to be a parent. I learned something this afternoon: Check, double check, and re-check the recipe! Are you willing to try making it?
This link has the instructions, just scroll down a little. Although the cake took a few hours of my life and made a legendary mess in the kitchen, I had a good time making it, learned something, and don't regret it!
Second of all, is the Les Miserables soundtrack. I was cruising the CD shelves at the library and stumbled upon it. Hmm, I thought, perhaps this will be interesting. I settled down in my room with it, planning to read Enna Burning or something while listening, but ended up paging through the booklet, reading the lyrics, and sometimes singing, along with the performers. What powerful music!
I have been planning to read the novel for a while, and I am sure that figuring out the story through the songs will give me a better understanding of the 1000+ page tome.
