A tale of two cakes, two potential disasters, and a double birthday party!

Red Velvet Recipe    Creamy Vanilla Frosting Recipe

Chocolate Buttermilk Layer Cake Recipe     Chocolate Buttercream Icing Recipe

All’s well that ends well. So goes the saying and so went a long night of baking.

THE RED VELVET STORY

Verify! That’s the word to remember here. I verified everything for making this red cake, except the red food coloring.

OK. Now what?

La belle did find some food coloring, but it was in a powder form that neither she nor la bête had seen before. And now they know they never want to see it again. As it turned out, the powdery food coloring was actually yellow (not red) and was 96% salt, 4% color. But that was only discovered after making the batter, seeing it turn burnt orange and taste salty. THEN “you-know-who”, the “one who cannot be named” read the label on the can.

Yep. You got it.

Uh huh.

CHOCOLATE BUTTERMILK LAYER CAKE STORY

This is the story about a pan on a shelf in a house in the desert.

The pan was a tall pan, a cake pan, a tall cake pan, said Sam. Sam liked tall things, and didn’t like seeing tall things stuck on short shelves. So Sam had an idea…

And so it happened. Sam took the tall pan, the tall cake pan, from the short shelf, and filled it with all the cake batter he could find. Sam was good at finding cake batter. Sam was so excited when he put the tall cake pan with all the cake batter he could find into the not-so-tall oven, that he forgot to look at the clock or set the timer. So, after a whiling-away time for quite a while, Sam was wondering. “How long has that tall cake pan been in the not-so-tall oven?” Well, said Sam to himself, there’s no real telling. So let’s take a look.” And look he did. And what did he find?

Sam found a very funny thing but it didn’t make him laugh. The tall cake pan in the oven that was not-so-tall had no cake at all. Inside the tall cake pan was a tall amount of liquid with a very firm hat on top. “What to do?”, thought Sam. “I know”, he said out loud, “I’ll lower the temp on the tall cake pan. Lower means slower”, he said feeling proud.

And so he waited, and he waited, and he waited. And then he looked again. And, what did he find?

Then Sam put the very tall cake pan back on the very short shelf and went to bed.

SWEET DREAMS.