Happy Monday everyone!

Well…it finally happened.

Just a couple of weeks after reaching my first baking milestone of creating my own recipe, I reached another baking milestone.

My first cake disaster.

I got lucky with this disaster – it could have been MUCH worse.  This wasn’t me slipping and falling with a cake on top of me, this wasn’t finding one of my cats with its head fully enveloped in cake.

But it was bad enough.

I was so close to being done.  I had finished the decorations on the bottom tier of the cake, and all I had left to do was put polka dots on the top tier and figure out where the name was going to go.  The cake was sitting on my super nifty tilting turntable, which I love.  Or loved.

In order to roll out some additional fondant for polka dots, I decided to shift the entire turntable (cake included) over to the side.  Why I’m this dumb sometimes, I’ll never know.  But in my haste, my arm or hand or something somehow pressed the “tilt” button on the turntable.  While my cake board stayed in place on the nice rubberized surface, the entire cake went sliding off the back, causing a reaction from me that sounded similar to “Oh my God aiiiieeeeeee noooooo!!” I grabbed that cake like there was no tomorrow (I guess in this case, there WAS no tomorrow, because there was no way I could’ve remade this).

This is the cake I had been working on ALL WEEK.  Every night had a different task that needed to get done in order for me to have a cake ready by Saturday morning.

When my cake was back up on my board, I about broke down into tears of anger and frustration.  In order to catch the cake, I needed to apparently leave a nice thumb-press in the bottom tier.  And the top tier managed to catch on the back edge of the counter near the backsplash, which just happened to rip a huge chunk of fondant off the top.

But – like I said – it could have been worse.  I didn’t have any cake broken off.  I technically still had a workable cake, albeit one that needed a lot of love.

There was NO WAY I was going to let this turntable get the best of me.

After freaking out for about, oh, thirty minutes or so, I gave up, put the cake in the fridge to re-set, and took a shower to wash all frustration away.  I came back to my cake, and again, just stared at for a bit.  

Eventually I figured that I could use a ribbon to cover up the hole on the bottom tier, but the giant fondant rip was just so massive.  After a lot of thoughts (and a lot of online research), my first thought was to try to melt fondant and use it to spackle the cake.  Let me just say, while this idea sounds like it would work… um, no.  I must’ve missed fondant spackling day in baking school.  The melted fondant ended up looking kind of like shiny plastic, and was so unbelievably sticky that I can’t imagine how on earth it could be used as spackle – all it did was pull other chunks of fondant off.  Back to square one.

After talking to myself (and I guess the cats) for a bit, I decided to go with a small drape of fondant that looked like a blanket, on which I could put the baby boy’s name.  It still needed a little something, so my first thought was to try to make some sort of toy boat or toy truck.  In the end, I decided on a little teddy bear to sit on top of the blanket.

And lo and behold, it looked like a cake again.

This top tier of this cake was vanilla bean cake with chocolate Italian Meringue Buttercream, and the bottom tier was chocolate cake with French Buttercream mixed with chocolate chips. 

And it was delicious 🙂