Accidental Accomplishment

Yesterday, my mom made a passing comment about wanting chocolate cake.  Concurrently,  I decided to take a look around for a new recipe.  I found one that piqued my interest, and almost absent mindedly printed it out.  Fast forward to today, when, as I chased Cadence around the house keeping one ear on the vice presidential debate, I somehow thought it would be a prefect time to try it out.

Because we have a household of 6, food goes very quickly around here.  To fix this, we've taken to doubling any recipe we make.  We've been cooking a lot, -and were this a food blog, we would have had so much fodder that we might actually have followers that don't know us directly-and so far this has served us very well.  But, dear readers, this is not merely an issue of a larger pot.  This is a cake.  A layer cake.  Which means there will be two.  Layer cakes.  That's a lot of cake pans. 

So, as Palin and Biden alternately angered, relieved, and baffled me, and as Cadence zoomed around my legs, I undertook one of the oddest cake batters I've ever faced.  The result was the consistency of water, and I was convinced that I'd totally screwed the whole thing up, but as time wore on and our poor oven tug-tug-tugged along filled to the brim with cake pans, it turned to a nice cakey black sponge.  mmmmm.  

While they cooled, I sent James and Cadence to bed and began work on the frosting.  Wow, that's a lot of butter, I thought.  followed, sometime after, by the stupidly stunning realization that this was not your ordinary home recipe. (something about double boiling chopped chocolate should have tipped me off, I suppose...did I mention all the above stuff about how I never reallly looked at the recipe?  yeah, about that...) I glanced at my recipe once more and noticed a line of small text that had been forgotten by the formatting and got lumped into a large paragraph instead of being the heading it was meant to be.  Evidently I had decided to undertake the creation of two chocolate buttercream layer cakes in the midst of the chaos of my usual life, smack in the middle of bedtime.  Who's paying attention, huh?

Amazingly, this isn't a disaster story, rather, I am writing this from a feeling of quiet triumph...my entire family (critters included) is asleep, but I just finished my ill advised cakes and they both came out beautifully.  Hooray for accidental accomplishments!  I didn't really mean to put myself up to this challenge, but I feel very gratified for having completed it without a single major disaster, and I dare say it all worked out just as it should have.

Here's a sloppy and can-I-go-to-bed-yet photo of one of my cakes.  (My shadow got in the way of the other one.  It looks just like this, but it's square.)

That's all for tonight, folks.  For now, I'm going to take my tired and triumphant little butt to join my husband in that nice warm bed.