It's my birthday...and I can cry if I want to.

Disastrous...that describes my birthday cake this year.  What a huge disappointment!  How can I have failed so miserably?!  Things started off so good.

I started with Sprinkle Bakes' white wedding cake recipe for the cake batter.  I love wedding cake so I thought that would be a perfect combination with Beantown Baker's raspberry curd.  And since I love cream cheese frosting, I thought I'd frost the cake with Glorious Treats' vanilla cream cheese frosting.  With that combination, how could I go wrong?  But oh, things went so terribly wrong.

Now, I've never claimed to be good at decorating cakes, or even making them for that matter.  I do enjoying baking things and I'm certainly better at some things.  I consider myself a newbie in the cake world.  And really, to sum it up, I probably know just enough to be dangerous as evidenced by this little "experiment".  

The cake itself turned out fairly decent. It was a nice pretty white color although this picture here makes it look a tad yellow.  And it tasted pretty good too.  

Next I made a raspberry/blackberry curd (I didn't have enough frozen raspberries to make the entire recipe.  I've never made a curd before, but I must say that is a real treat!  It is much easier than I imagined (just cook and strain) and the flavor was brilliant.  Thanks to Beantown Baker for making it look so easy.  Even the pulp and seeds left over after I strained the liquid tasted like heaven on our biscuits the next morning in place of preserves. 

And here is what it looked like on the cake.  I even made a "dam" to prevent the curd from running over he sides of the cakes.  Looks promising, right?

Oh, if only the dam had been strong enough to keep that raspberry blackberry curd inside.  I knew after I put the third layer on that this wasn't going well.  And by the time I put the top layer on and started to frost it, I realized I was going to have to take that cake apart and reassemble it.  So I did.  And I chilled the cake between each addition and hoped for the best.  But as you can see below, it was nothing more than a hope. The layers refused to quit sliding off of each other creating a completely lopsided cake.  At least this time, there was no raspberry curd peaking out...

 well, at least for a little while anyway.  Here's what the cake looked like the next morning.

If I hadn't waited until the last minute and if at that moment it wasn't already approaching midnight, I probably would have thrown that icing away and just started over.  But it was nearly midnight, and the cake was for myself and not for a anyone else, a party or anything, just for us to have on my birthday.   So I scrapped any dreams of my perfect birthday cake and trying to decorate the outside with any special icing techniques and just did a basic piping.  I didn't even change the tip for the writing on the top.  And I went to bed.

Here is a good picture of how the cake layers just completely slid apart (and you can see how i just kept filling it in with icing).  I think this cake wins the award for the worst looking cake I've ever made.  

But it didn't taste so bad.  It was a little on the sweet side (mainly because I kept adding powdered sugar to try to get the icing to thicken up a little).  The girls liked the icing the best but were disappointed that I put fruit in the cake.  The hubs liked the fruit, but could have done without the icing.  I was so frustrated with it, that I almost wanted to throw the whole cake away without a bite. But now everyone who reads this post will know that I am nothing more than I say that I am, which is just a novice baker who knows just enough to create a disastrous cake.

I guess I'll be looking for my next redemption cake.  And I'm thinking Little Bit has to be thinking to herself how glad she is that she asked for a Baskin Robbins ice cream cake for her birthday this year!