Test Cake! Or, why I leave baking to the experts

Some of you may know this already:  I do not care about dessert.  I am an enormous fan of Nestle Turtles, and anything vaguely pecan-chocolate-clustery, but besides that, I would really be OK to never eat anything sweet again.

So when it came to my wedding cake, I decided: here was a great opportunity to save some money!  Who actually eats wedding cake anyway?  There will most certainly not be shoving of cake into my face by the hubs-elect....

And immediately there were riots.  My sister went up in arms, my roommates in London began to insist they would not come to my wedding if I insisted on such insanity.  So in the face of such intense dessert-loving friends, we came up with a solution:  I would save money on the cake by having Lisa bake one, and my London roommate bake the other.

So I have been happily ignoring the cakes, until recently when I realized that I should look into the recipe and try it out in the cake pans I had bought.  And what a perfect opportunity presented itself!  My lovely future mother in law (who really is lovely) celebrated her birthday this past weekend, and I decided I would win her over further with my charming cake.

So I went to my mom's house (because it was empty as they were on vacation, and because she has a KitchenAid), and decided that cake baking = no problem.  So first things first, I go to separate 8 eggs.

An inauspicious beginning, as I immediately break the first yolk into the first egg white.  Bah.

Ok!  So!  now I have 8 eggs separated.  Now the flour.....

Can you tell I was really more interested in taking cool photos of the stuff than in the actual making of cake?

Action shot!

This is how I felt afterwards.  Desolated and covered in flour and egg white. 

I knew something wasn't quite right - and I should have known that I needed to beware any recipe that included folding in egg whites...but I didn't listen to my inner voice.  As my father says, ALWAYS listen to your inner voice... because this is what my cakes looked like on the inside:

Lumps of horrible, unmixed cake batter.  Ugh.

So I went into panic mode, and was really really grateful for the fact that my parents buy eggs in packages of 18.  It was 5:30 - the first cake had taken me 3 hours to ruin, and we were supposed to be at Brandon's parents by 6:30.  I threw together a second batch of cake batter, mixed it properly this time, and melted a ton of chocolate and butter together.  And behold:

a little sucking up never hurt anyone :)

 It sure looks good, doesn't it?  Too bad it didn't taste great :(  But I tried!  And the hubs family, to their everlasting credit, ate everything I served them and even came back for seconds.

And this is why I leave the baking in my family to the masters.  Sigh.

Well except for these cheese and adobo pepper cornmeal muffins, which I made on Sunday morning.  They were delish.