I think I know now why the cake wreck blog took off so quickly, and why it’s actually gotten popular enough to be made into a book. Cakes are immensely prone to wrecks. At every stage of the process, from mixing the batter to baking to getting it out of the cake pan to frosting can go disastrously wrong. It’s also that many things normally considered excusable in other forms of food-making suddenly seem heightened in their awfulness when you’re making a cake. People have high standards for cakes. Not only must it taste good and have good texture, it must be structurally sound and beautiful. No one cares if a stir-fry or a spare rib doesn’t stay stacked in a three-layer tower, or crumble when you try to roll it. No one cares if it looks disheveled and thrown together, which often actually adds to its devil-may-care culinary appeal.

Today, my cake roll adventure, which may or may not have ended in a wreck this time (you judge), took from start to finish a total of four hours. Cookies, muffins, and even cheesecake? Half an hour for certain, I can do it. Cake, particularly this cake roll, was a challenge. Every step of the way I was a nervous wreck. A nervous cake wreck. This was exacerbated by the fact that I had to fulfill certain stringent requirements with regards to the color of the cake (I’ll explain). Furthermore, if anything went horribly wrong, I couldn’t exactly start over because there are no replacement ingredients to be bought today, it being Thanksgiving and whatnot. (By the way, what a funny grammatical construction. But I guess it’s cool for me to be colloquial. It being that no one reads my blog and whatnot. =D)

Cake rolls are notoriously hard… for me at least. (OK ex-roommates. Stop laughing now.) My last attempt ended up in a smushed cake… uh, casserole. Basically the darn thing fell apart when I tried to roll it. This time I did my research ahead of time. I learnt that a good spongecake is required. Spongecake is bouncy and resilient and kind of stretchy. You could roll and unroll that sucker all day long and it’d keep its structural integrity. Although you probably would not want to eat it afterwards. Here is the recipe I found and used:

Orange Sponge Cake Roll

I made some modifications as I didn’t actually want the cake to taste of orange. So I left out the marmalade and subbed blueberry jam. I also didn’t have cake flour so I followed these tips to make my own approximation thereof. Finally, I halved the sugar, as this was being made for a Chinese parents type of crowd and they do not like their cakes all sugared out.

The cake itself went pretty well, up until the point I got it out of its pan. I had not greased the wax paper well enough. Whodathunk you had to grease something that was already waxed? I ended up spending way too long peeling off wax paper in little shreds, and the cake cooled completely before I could roll it up in a towel to set its shape. I stuck it back in the oven, at which point it then overbaked slightly and got a little harder than it should have been. Oh well, next step.

I then spread the cake with Acadia National Park wild blueberry jam, which is awesome. This step went well. Then I rolled it back up. This step went well, too. It did! You can look at the pictures at the end if you don’t believe me.

There was a problem.

Okay, so I mentioned before there was a color requirement. My cake had to be… blue. This is is because I was making it for Thanksgiving dinner at Yang’s house, and his mom decided that the theme of the dinner is to be colors. And I was assigned the most impossible color. Blue. Nothing is blue in nature that’s meant to be edible. Not even blueberries are blue! Technically speaking. She told me she gave me blue was because I’m the most creative. Sigh.

The problem was that, because of this color requirement, I had put a tiny bit of blue food coloring in the batter. When I was mixing the batter, it looked reasonably blue. A little teal, perhaps, from combining with the yellow of the egg yolks. But after baking, the color was decidedly green. And not even a nice, springly vegetal green… it was sickly blue-green. I made a blue-green cylinder. By Jove, it did not look delicious at all.

My original plan was to sprinkle powdered sugar over the whole shebang and be done with it. I now knew that was not going to be okay. This blue log deal had to be frosted.

I was like, This is cool, I can frost this thing. I’ve made awesome buttercream frosting before. But then all sorts of stuff went wrong. The butter wouldn’t melt consistently. Then it melted into pure hot liquid. Then I beat in too much sugar and it got hard, so I added milk. I added too much milk, and it was basically water until I added all the powdered sugar we had in the house. It was still runny as hell. I was all @#$%^&@!* at the ceiling. Then I realized we had a small reserve of powdered sugar that Nika’s mom brought over. I went for it, but not before siphoning off half of the goo. I mixed all of the sugar in the goo and it turned into frosting consistency. WHEW.

I frosted that sucker. And here it is: blue roll cake.

Off to the party!