Today has got to go down in the books as my worst caking day ever! Got a request for a carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. Having never done either, I used a few recipes from here.

First, the batter for the cake was so thick and it wouldn't fill the pans. I emptied the pans into a large bowl and added box of vanilla cake and mixed it all. It took forever to grate 6 c. of carrots! Then the cake was too crumbly with all the carrots in it. grrr. It took 5 boxes of mix to make a two layer stacked 12 - 6.

Then for the cream cheese frosting...My CC still had little lumps in it after I beat it, even though I added hot liquid. I tried to torch the bowl but that didn't work very well. Then I realized I forgot to add the shortening and added it at the end. It tasted amazing! But it was very soft, I think I added too much liquid. I iced the cake in it and the sides slid right off! It's not hot here, maybe 65 today, and the cake's been in the fridge.

I ended up making a batch of my regular crusting icing and mixed the two. I scraped all the icing off the cake and started again. For the life of me, I couldn't get it iced evenly - it looks like a little kid did it!! :'( Every time i got a spatula near it, it ripped all the icing off. Finally, I pulled out that large icer tip that I don't like and used that. Still couldn't smooth it very well, but it had started to crust and was like elephant skin. The more I tried to fix it, the worse it got.

I've spent about 8 hours already on this fricking cake. I used 8 lbs of powdered sugar and five mixes today for one cake!! Now I'm going to bed b/c I don't want to look at it anymore today!!!

Not that I'm glad that this happened to you, but it sure makes me feel better that I'm not the only one who has days like this! I just had a decorating disaster that would take The Great American Novel to explain, but it had a happy-ish ending.

Tomorrow is another day! (Thank goodness!!!)