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!
