I like cakes. I like making cakes. I like eating them even better. I do not like frosting cakes. Honestly, I don’t like frosting all that well; I would rather dust cakes with powdered sugar or top them with fruit. Occasionally I feel the need to frost them, and it usually doesn’t turn out well.

I used this dark chocolate cake recipe with jet black cocoa. The only people who have voiced less than wonderful opinions of the cake either don’t like chocolate or don’t like chocolate cake (and some of them even admit it is "not too bad").

So I tried the tip of using wax paper strips around the edges of the cake to keep the cake platter clean. That was great, except I managed to get the cake horribly off center. When I noticed, I made some attempts at moving the cake, but decided that it was going to have to stay where it was.

I was also planning on using the same butter cream frosting that I used to put the layers together. Well, I didn’t particularly like the color (it called for vanilla, so it wasn’t quite white), but I should have known better than to use a light frosting on this cake- because it looks pretty bad when dark cake crumbs show up in the frosting. The cake also showed through at some thin spots in the frosting. If I had stopped the cake there, it might have been less than perfect, but not embarrassing.

Unfortunately I didn’t stop there. I had some cupcakes too, so I wanted to make up some strawberry frosting for them. The first problem was I was out of powdered sugar. Not to worry, I have a knowledgeable mother-in-law who knows the secret of turning granulated sugar into powdered sugar- a blender or a coffee maker. After a miserable attempt at using my immersion blender (I was skeptical, but I wanted to avoid cleaning the coffee maker, I don’t have a traditional blender, and I didn’t want to attempt it with my food processor) and ending up with sugar in my eyes, I cleaned out the coffee maker and used it. It worked wonderfully, and I even threw in some Jello mix (I got the idea to use Jello here.), and I think it worked better in the frosting than if I had just thrown in the Jello mix without blending it.

I thought since I had a use for colored frosting anyway and this is a birthday cake after all, I should try to write "Happy Birthday" on it. Unfortunately, I don’t have a frosting bag. I attempted to make the wax paper version, but that wasn’t working out, so I just cut off a small bit of the corner of a plastic bag. Metal tips are wonderful. A real bag with the tips will be going on my wishlist. As you might expect in a cake calamity, I ran out of room for the ‘y’ in "Birthday." I tried to fix it, and ended up with a big smear, which I tried to make look artistic. So I rewrote "Birthday." Attempting to make my artistic smear less obvious, I thought I’d try to add other artistic embellishments, which looked even worse. In the end, I ended up adding a layer around the edge, and hoped that it wouldn’t overwhelm the chocolate cake.

Oh well, people though it was "cute." The focus shouldn’t be on the cake anyway- it was about celebrating someone’s birthday.