I'll Never Win A Bake-Off

I'd be jealous of that cake too!
Poor Reeves. He better grow out of this egg allergy. Apparently eggs are one of the ingredients that really help to hold a cake together. Who knew? This is bad news for Reeves as he does not have a mother who is at all adept at making a cake, even in the best of circumstances. Believe it or not, I love to cook, but baking is a scary, foreign territory to me, and I only venture into it once or twice a year. I don't know why I am so afraid of it. It is probably because I have hardly ever been successful in any attempt at it. Thursday was no exception. Isn't the rule that if the toothpick comes out clean, then the cake is done? Yeah, not in my kitchen. It all looked fine until I took it out of the pan. I even let it cool before I tried to ice it. According to Alton Brown, you are supposed to put a "crumb layer" on, cool it, then really try to ice it. Again, not so much in my kitchen. This was my first layer. Thank heavens for left over batter. This layer got tossed. It was like trying to ice a bucket of dirt, without the bucket. The rest was baked in a variety of not-intended-for-baking-a-cake dishes. A Corian small dish, a Pyrex bowl, and a small creme brulee ramekin. What a mess! The icing of these layers was only slightly more successful than the first horrific showing, but this was all I had, so it had to work. Luckily, I have an icing bag, so I just filled that up and covered the cake as well as I could. Reeves seemed to like it OK, but, of course, he's only 2! Like I said, "Poor Reeves!"
This is actually a bit upsetting to me because each year for our birthdays, my mother makes us a wonderful homemade caramel cake. Three layers of delicious goodness wrapped in the best caramel icing ever. Friends of mine even know to try to be around in August for a piece of this cake. It is nearly legendary in our circle. Reach for somebody's icing that they still have sitting on their plate, and you could pull back a nub. That stuff is sacred. Sure, some years the icing isn't as perfectly applied as others, but in all my 31 years, I have yet to see her provide me with something as hideous as what I gave my son on his second birthday. Maybe that's why we don't really remember much when we're very young. Or maybe that's just why there aren't any pictures of my birthday cakes from that age. Could it be that practice truly does make perfect? That maybe my mother started out with poorly decorated cakes for me, and by the time Reeves is old enough to remember these cakes, they'll actually be something worthy of sharing with anyone other than family? I can only hope. In the meantime, I'll just pray that he outgrows his allergies and learns to focus more on taste than presentation.