Picture's Worth 1,000 Words, Part 2

So I wanted to make a cake for Christmas dinner. The cake was in Southern Living. This, according to the magazine people, is what the cake was supposed to look like (except that I was only going to do three layers, not six):

Pretty, huh? Chocolate red velvet cake with cream cheese icing. My cake, of course, looked nothing like that. Instead, it looked like this:


The severe lopsidedness was not my fault. I put the cake pans on a cookie sheet so they would be easier to take out of the oven, and one of the cookie sheets did that weird popping thing in the oven, where one end decided it just didn't want to be flat. (The large crack in the top is from putting a toothpick in to try to hold the cake together.)

The rest of the weirdness resulted from my attempt to be somewhat healthy. I got fat-free cream cheese for the icing. In my defense, I have another recipe for cream cheese frosting which does use fat-free cream cheese. So I didn't think this would be any different. What I failed to notice was that said other recipe had about twice the ratio of powdered sugar to cream cheese that the one in Southern Living did. So the icing ran. Everywhere. See all that icing that goes to the edge of the plate? Yeah, that was originally on the cake. It ran so much that I frosted the cake and we still had half a bowl of icing left.

So we ate the cake like Dunkaroos. Remember Dunkaroos? I think they were made by the Handi-Snack people. Basically Dunkaroos involved two compartments: one for cookies of various flavors, and one with icing to dunk the cookies in. So we dunked the cake. Oh, it was terrible. None of us ate more than one piece. And that, my friends, is my funny Christmas story.