Does that mean I’m a good wife or a bad wife?

Last night I got bit by the baking bug, and dived into a homemade from scratch chocolate cake at 8:00pm. All in all, it went pretty well, but I’ll go ahead and say this now. It wasn’t the best thing I’ve ever made.

Maybe because I was distracted by the loud shooting noises coming from Wyatt playing video games in the living room.  (Just kidding, he’s actually doing a lot better about having the volume lower.)

But all jokes aside, the cake part came out great. The icing? Well, I’ll start at the beginning.

I started out with a recipe from my giant Betty Crocker cookbook. (Thanks, Grandma B!)

And like I said already, the cake came out great. It smelled good, it looked good… (It also looked huge. I mean, there’s just two of us! Why did I bake a whole cake?!?)

…the only thing that would have made it better would be if I had 2 round cake pans instead of just one 13×9. But I’m a newlywed with a tiny kitchen, and in my promises during my wedding, I promised to be a creative problem solver.

So my idea? Use the big rectangle and cut it in half!

Which worked okay…sorta.

Because the way that a cake rises in the middle of a big pan like that didn’t make a great-looking stacked cake once it was cut in half. Wyatt offered the suggestion to trim some of the cake off to make it sit better. But me, ever the conserver, didn’t want to waste any of it…but alas, I should have done that, because we had several gaps around the edges where the rounded ends didn’t meet.

So, I learned my lesson. Next time, I’ll trim the cake. But I’m working on a way to “re-use” the trimmed off part, other than to just eat those myself while everyone else enjoys the pretty cake.

Anyway, I decided to use a chocolate ganache in between the two layers of cake. And I’ve never made that before either, so I went online and found a recipe, or rather two recipes from great sources (Bakergirl and Joy of Baking) and I mixed up a combination between the two.

And I was pretty nervous because it started out looking like this:

And then, since I was still waiting for the cake to cool, I thought, “hey, I’ll make frosting, too!”

Too bad I didn’t get to use it.

Because there was so much ganache we decided to just dump it all over the cake and make it almost like a glazed frosting. And after that, there was no way to use the frosting. So now I have a container of homemade chocolate frosting in my fridge, just waiting to make some other to-be-made dessert even more delicious.

I’m sure it will be good on some cake. Just not this cake.

But at the end of the night, we had our cake. And ate it, too!