Well, half of one of the cakes ended up stuck to the tinfoil. I was trying to recreate a previous failure, the slow-cooker chocolate cake in The Italian Slow Cooker. Except this time, I searched around on the Internet and found that other people were making a similar cake in the oven. So, I took the sour-cream chocolate-chip cake, the one I am too embarrassed to photograph, out of the oven.
The instructions said to line a springform pan with buttered foil. More importantly, the instructions said to butter the BOTTOM of the pan with buttered foil. But my son was up last night from three to five a.m. because of a scary dream about a monster, and I forgot this important detail about the foil. I put the foil up the sides of the pan and poured in the batter.
Suddenly, I panicked. Would my cake be tremendously misshapen and unattractive? I hurriedly poured the batter back out into a bowl. I lost at least a quarter of it in the process. I washed off the foil as best I could (I ran out of foil and didn't have any more, and I imagine all the stores are closed today), and poured in what was left of the batter. I stuck the whole mess in the oven.
I think my oven doesn't work very well. I always have to double the cooking time. It took an hour to bake the cake instead of 25 minutes. At the end of baking, I cooled the cake down for five minutes as instructed.
I was then supposed to invert the cake. It was then that I lost another quarter of it.
The cake, which had risen somewhat in the oven, sank again dejectedly.
And this, my friends, is how two cakes became one-half of one cake. I am pretty sure I will be attending Thanksgiving dinner empty-handed. But this is probably to the benefit of my hosts.
