Death of a chocolate cake

It might seem odd that I've decided to blog about a chocolate cake which was initially a failure...but that's only because with the help of my flatmates, I managed to salvage it and turn it into something beautiful. Well, ok, something.

Anyway, my plan was to make a chocolate layer cake for my friend's birthday. It was going to be decorated with chocolate curls, ganache and strawberries. It was going to be a work of art in sponge cake form. 6 bars of chocolate...off I go. I thought I would it would be the decorating stage where something went wrong, but unfortunately I never got there, because our bitch of an oven decided to burn the top of the cake whilst leaving the middle undercooked (I think I should do a separate post about our bitch oven, as we've lost so many cakes to that thing). I didn't know that some of the sponge was still slighly raw, and only found out when trying to slice the cake into layers, which caused it to crack.
"Shit! Fuck! Damn! dsdhfudthruoghdooshdygh. Whyyyyyyyyyyyyy?!?!"

I doubt anyone wants to hear about the minature fit I had in the kitchen that day, but I couldn't let that chocolate sponge go to waste (most of it was fine). So I took a knife to the already quite dead cake and cut it into bite sized pieces, layering them in a bowl with chocolate cream and strawberries.

(yeah ok, I admit it, I did only just post this so I had an excuse to draw faces on those strawberries)

There was still quite a bit of sponge left, and I did actually want something resembling a cake, even if it was going to be tiny. So I grabbed a heart cookie cutter and cut 3 hearts out of the remaining sponge, stacked them and decorated it with more chocolate and strawberries. It turned out a bit like one of those mini one-portion birthday cakes you can get in gift shops.

What was left was one layer of sponge, which had a rather strange shape due to bits being cut out of it. But it still had potential to be transformed...


...into a vomit cake! Crumbled biscuits were added to some chocolate cream for extra effect. Clearly my creativity knows no bounds.

I didn't actually give the vomit cake to my friend because I couldn't carry 3 cakes, so kept it for me and my flatmates to enjoy. Which we did, with beer. Thankfully no one actually vomited, because the cake tasted nice and the beer ran out before anyone got anywhere near to that stage. I'm not going to post the recipe for the chocolate sponge, since if you want to try this yourself it's not incredibly difficult to mess up baking a cake. My personal tips would be turning on the oven too high, adjusting the quantity of mixture but not adjusting the cooking time, or adding too much baking powder. Alternatively, get yourself a terrible oven like ours (if you're a student, chances are your shitty landlord has already provided one. Lucky you!).

There's no real moral to this story, but what I'm trying to say is that if something goes wrong in the kitchen, you can usually make the best of a bad job, and have some fun doing it at the same time :) Apart from if you put too much chilli in something. Adding water, sugar or yogurt can help up to a certain point, but after that you may as well chuck it in the bin before you end up killing your tongue eating it out of stubbornness.

Happy baking!