Valentine Cake Disaster

The rich smell of chocolate filled my pea green seventies kitchen as I mixed up the cake batter from scratch. The mountain chickadee jumped around the pine tree outside the widow, happy about the new suet that I put up, looking for a good angle to eat it. Everything was going well, my batter tasted good, I thought it would be a tasty cake. It is hard baking at over 5,000 feet though. I always adjust the temperature lower than what recipes call for, but I shouldn't have trusted to bake it as long as it called for. Long before the timer went off even, my cakes started to burn. I cut the burned parts off and shaped them into squares. The scrub jay came right up to the widow, standing on the outside counter to eat the dropped pieces of suet I left when I put it in the suet cage. He stood just inches from me, and I got a good look at the detail on his feathers and legs as he pecked at the counter and kept an eye on me. All I needed was frosting to cover my sad pieces of cake. I had to cut the recipe for the frosting in half though, I didn't have enough powder sugar. I forgot to cut one ingredient and it turned into a soupy mess.

I had to make a trip to the store to just buy pre-made trans fatty frosting and slopped it all over the cake. I didn't have powder sugar, so put a heart on top with regular sugar. I was ready to just throw the monstrosity into the trash when my 14 year old nephew came up from his cave downstairs and cut a big piece. Fifteen minutes later, I saw his scraped clean plate sitting on the counter. Since he ate the whole piece, it must have been good, and that empty plate was the best compliment on the worst looking cake.