failure | The Novice Gardener

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chocolate cake with fruits, dessert, failure, pecan pie, pecchoc cake, pie in cake, PumPecApple, white chocolate frosting

I missed my own party, oy!

I missed my own deadline, that’s what I meant. Still…oy!

I was supposed to bring you a dessert. A special dessert. Only it didn’t go as planned.

First off, I had such a dilemma about what to bring to Fiesta Friday Anniversary Part 2. I knew I wanted to bring a dessert. And to me, pies reign supreme as far as desserts are concerned.

But then, this was a special occasion. A special occasion calls for a cake. A serious cake. Layered and tiered. Or at least frosted and decorated.

So I thought about combining the two, a pie and a cake. I thought it was going to be so creative. I would bake a pie in the shape of a cake. And then stack another cake-shaped pie on top of it. Then pile a cloud of whipped cream on the whole thing and stick decorations or candles. And then it was going to be called a pie cake.

Trust me, this wasn’t the pie cake I had in mind.

I was set to make that pie cake. But first I had to google to see if someone had done such a thing before. I googled “pie cake”.

Do you know what you get when you google “pie cake”?

Topping the search engine result is this video from Food Network showing you how to make this cake.

What the heck?! Did you see that?

Apparently, there’s a bakery in Texas that makes this crazy concoction of a cake. 3 pies baked into three layers of cakes, stacked and iced. They call it PumPecApple.

Okay, who would have thought of such a thing? Only these 3 brothers from Texas, I guess.

I showed the video to my husband and kids. My daughter made a face, the same one I did when I first saw it (gross, right?). The boys, on the other hand, got extremely excited. Typical.

I wasn’t sure I would like the taste of such a cake. The whole thing just seemed too crazy; I do have my limits. But I knew if I made it, my Fiesta Friday friends would appreciate my effort.

My plan was to make only the layer that appealed to me, the pecan pie in chocolate cake layer, twice, and stack them to make a tall cake.

I did make them…but…they didn’t make it. The cakes. They didn’t make it. They didn’t turn out as I hoped.

Let’s see what went wrong.

The night before, I made the pecan pies. So far, so good.

The next day, I made the chocolate cake batter. Still okay up ’til now. The batter tasted great and everything. I poured it into my cake pans.

Then I ran into trouble when I placed the pies in. The pies were too high. Too deep for the cake pan.

At first I placed one pie face up, hoping the batter would rise up and engulf it as it baked.

It didn’t. Instead I got this.

So for the other one, I placed the pie face down, just like what the Food Network video showed. The batter didn’t exactly cover the pie, so I smeared more.

I was dubious this was going to work and my suspicion was confirmed. Basically, I got the reverse of the last cake. This time I got a cake with the bottom of a pie in its center sort of suspended in a little crater.

At this point, I started cursing the 3 brothers like they were my brothers.

So now I was left with these 2 pseudo cake/pie things I had no clue what to do with.

It took me another day to appreciate the failures. We’re humans. We make mistakes. And I hate to waste perfectly good food. I served the one pie cake as is. It actually started to grow on me after a while. I decided it wasn’t ugly and proudly presented it to my family. They didn’t even blink an eye. They took to it like ducks to water. It was GOOD! Like serious GOOD!

The other one, the one with the crater, I saved. And gave it the white-chocolate-mousse-frosting treatment (which by the way was also another saved failure), and piled fruits in the indentation. It was asking for it! Now, doesn’t it look pretty enough to serve at Fiesta Friday Anniversary?