Trainwreck

From this......

To this.

OMG, it was a big f-ing trainwreck.  I managed to get it all done, but that stupid chocolate cake with the peanut butter frosting almost did me in.  Seriously.

You saw those perfectly baked cake layers in the last post.  All good.  So I assembled the thing.  Carefully spread my peanut butter frosting on each layer, aligned them perfectly and did a "crumb coat" over it all.  I then placed it in the refrigerator (needing to move just about everything out of it to make room - can you say "spoiled milk"?) and left it there for 30 minutes.  Took it out, frosted it and did the chocolate glaze thing on top.  It looked gorgeous and perfect.

Twenty minutes later?  Not so much.  It apparently went south (or east or west, whatever).  The layers slid all over the place and the frosting in the middle of the cake layers oozed out in a bulge that reminded me of what it looks like when you put on waist-high pantyhose.  This was not pretty.

And it was 11pm.  I SO did not want to deal with this.  So I did what any rational person would do and I scraped all of the frosting and the glaze off of the g-d cake.  (My garbage disposal must have thought that it had died and gone to heaven).  And then I reassembled the whole thing, gave it another crumb coat and stuck it in the refrigerator.  Overnight.

Flash forward to this morning.  I gave up going to the gym and my favorite step class to deal with this damn cake.  And you can guess what happened - I pulled it out of the refrigerator, it was well-chilled, the crumb coat was well-set and....THE DAMN THING WAS STILL CROOKED.  It looked like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.  Crap, crap, crap.

I tried pushing the layers into place.  Nope, they were cold enough that it wasn't an option.  So I decided to fix it with frosting.

But speaking of frosting, the recipe in the previous post DID NOT WORK.  It tasted good, but it didn't spread well and it had these weird pockets of bubbles in it.  Don't use it.  I went back to my favorite food guru (that would be Ina Garten) and made a batch of her peanut butter frosting.  Much, much better.  And, it managed to hide all of my cake-making mistakes.

INA'S PEANUT BUTTER FROSTING

1 cup confectioner's sugar

1 cup creamy peanut butter

5 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

1/2 cup heavy cream

Place first 5 ingredients in an electric mixer and beat until well-combined and smooth and fluffy.  Add cream and beat on high speed until smooth.

So I am beat and I am tired and I never, ever want to smell peanut butter again.  Or encounter cream cheese frosting. Yuck.  Please, oh please can I have some guacamole?

But I managed to get it all done.  Here are my crappy iPhone photos to prove it....

         Finished and waiting for Henry to figure out

          how in the hell we are going to transport

                          these creations

                  Got it there!  (Thanks, Henry)

             Oh, and I ROCKED the cupcakes!