The Story of the Ugly Cake - Daring Bakers July

This story started, as all good things should, with a very tasty sounding cake. It had a lovely light nut sponge cake base, alcohol infused simple syrup, drizzled chocolate, and light but buttery frosting. Sigh. It should have turned out as a beautiful cake.

But there were two forks in the road. And I took the one less traveled. I, as a naive second time Daring Baker, decided that even this insanely complicated sounding recipe was no match for my magical wand of healthiness. I could tackle this one too! I would use some natural agave as sweetening, replace the white cake flour with no gluten oat flour, make "buttercream" using frozen coconut oil, and use a natural apricot jam.

All was going swimmingly in cake baking land. My filbert gateu was coming together beautifully - not even a hint of trouble from the agave and oat flour. I stuck that baby in the oven and filled the apartment with the delicious aromas of a hard earned cake.

And then I found out why it's the road less traveled...

(See more broken cake in background)

Oh. And this was just the beginning. Nevermind that my cake had crumbled...probably because I took the low-gluten content of cake flour and subsituted no gluten oat flour. I should've thought of that. Oh yes, but the real downfall what that I didn't fully read the directions for subsituting agave (posted by the lovely folks over at Madhava).

I hate directions...they really ought to have considered direction haters like me when they wrote these. I mean I listened to the liquid reduction directions - that was a simple enough calculation. But then I got distracted and forgot that there was a second part of the instructions which told me that I should reduce the temperature by 25 degrees. Note for next time - those folks know what they're talking about. Because not only did my cake fall apart, but it was slightly burnt even before the recommended time had been reached.

Ok, that won't stop me, I thought. I'll save it! So I made a mini-cake. Because while I may have little experience, I'm a Daring Baker dammit, the blogroll says so, and this small setback wasn't going tobe the end.

So I cut out the salvagable cake pieces and stuck that in the freezer to wait while I spent a few days constructing the rest.

In a flash of genius I decided that there would be no butter in my buttercream. I used this lovely sounding recipe from the ingenious Elana over at Elana's Pantry. I subsituted hazelnut milk for the coconut milk to stick with the theme. And honestly, the frosting turned out GREAT considering that it was so natural and pure. But I let it sit in the freezer too long, and then out of the freezer too long, and by that point buttercream it was not (Please note that she didn't claim that it would be, but I still thought I would give it a shot).


To go with the frosting I had planned to do hazelnut pralines made with brown rice syrup. It never hardened...was more like a hazelnut brown rice syrup taffy. At this point I was getting tired...

I threw together the other pieces -

• Simple syrup made with agave - CHECK
  
• Apricot syrup made with a natural jam - CHECK
  
• Chocolate ganache made with soy creamer - CHECK

But honestly, by the time I got around to putting the darn thing together I was so exhausted from all of the steps and discouraged by the way things were going, I made what I consider the vital error. I got lazy! And apparently, cakes DO NOT LIKE that. So when I decided not to trim the edges of my cake and halfheartedly cut it into three layers, it got mad.

It got so mad that it dared me to brush on more simple syrup than I knew it needed, it refused to let the ganache harden, and it melted my poor healthy frosting. And this, my friends, was the result....

So as you can probably tell, I'm not even giving you the recipe for this one. If you're going to spend your time on this cake, do it the right way. The way the experts did it. Because quite honestly, everyone elses looked quite wonderful. Unlike my goopy, overly sweet mess.

See the work of a real expert (and our host of the month) over at Chris' blog Melle Cotte

But don't worry, this isn't all for naught. I'm ready for a new challenge next month. And I'm going to apply everything I learned. And though I still plan to try out the healthy stuff, you better believe that I'm going to read those darn directions :)