Oh No! I Feel Like Everything Is Going Wrong
Decorating By tsal Updated 31 Oct 2010 , 8:44pm by cabecakes
I am making a 3-tier cake for my son's bday. The bottom is chocolate and the top 2 are vanilla chiffon.
I baked my chocolate cake yesterday and the layers seem thin and now I'm worried that my appliques won't fit onto the sides of the cake.
My chiffon cakes did not turn out as usual (they pulled away from the sides of the pans, and then when I was unmolding one at 1am, it cracked! I will try to repair it with bc.
I wanted to make a raspberry chambord smbc, but my raspberry purée doesn't taste so good.
I will crumbcoat and decorate today, but I feel like I am racing against time because I have all the other food to prepare for tomorrow's party.
I'm choosing to look at this as a test of my 'fixing' skills. If I can pull this off, I can do anything. Wish me luck!
I don't have any advice, but I can commiserate! I'm working on a carved Thomas cake for my twins' birthday party later today, and it's a train wreck. It collapsed already (shame on me for not having support), and during emergency surgery, it split left and right. Now it's a lumpy, bumpy, lopsided mess that I don't know if I have the skill to fix.
Like you, I'm looking at it now as a test of my fixing skills. It might end up in the disasters section, but I'm finishing the thing for my boys!
So good luck to you! You can do it!
Commiserations to both of you. I know this feeling well. Attempted to do Debbie Brown's Scooby Doo Spooky Castle Cake and the cake was a disaster which I cobbled together to look like a haunted house. (Pic in the Halloween section).
I have also tried to do the 'carved' Thomas cake and gave up! I now model a Thomas out of gum paste - fiddly but much easier!!!!!
Good luck! xxx
I had a very similar incident. My advice is just relax and take a break, do something totally unrelated for a bit and then come back to cake. It worked for me hopefully it will work for you as well.
Good luck I'm sure it will work out great!
My kitchen looked like a demolition site last night after completing the Scooby cake. Grit your teeth, put on a pair of rubber gloves and get scrubbing! You'll feel much better once your 'art studio' is back to it's tidy gleaming normality!
CP xxx
I had the same thing happen to me while doing my daughters b-day cake. Hers was very simple but the recipe I made 3 times fell all 3 times. I then found another recipe that I was going to try and it had no taste. I did not even waste me time putting in the oven. In the end, I was up til 3am and the cake was very basic and nothing what I had planned. I really feel your pain. I agree that you should walk away for a minute and come back to it later.
I can totally sympathize with you!!
I made a two tiered cake for 75 people a couple of weeks ago for my daughter's first birthday. The bottom tier was a 16 inch square banana sour cream cake. After putting 1 layer of filling between the two layers for the bottom tier, I realized that I had mistakenly ended up with the wrong layer on top, and figured it would be more even, less crumby and more easily iced if I turned the whole thing upside down. The whole assembled first tier (one two inch layer + layer of filling + another two inch layer) was sitting on a cooling rack, so I took another cooling rack, put it on top of it, and attempted to invert the entire thing to make the right side up. BIG MISTAKE!! 
The 16 * 16 cake was monstrous and way too heavy with the filling to succesfully pull off flipping over; it ended up cracking and a good 1/4 of the cake slipped through the cooling rack and onto the floor. 
It was horrible...banana cake and raspberry filling was oozing down my cabinets...me sitting on the floor in front of piles of cake crying in total despair!!! And the clock ticking at 9:45pm the night before my daughter's party!
Well, necessity is the mother of invention...I cut the cake 3/4 of the way to salvage what was left, but realized that I may not have enough portions to serve all my guests. There was no way I was up for baking another cake at this point, so I ran out to the grocery store with 10 minutes to spare before closing time. I found 4 pound cakes that I thought might do the trick (there were only two banana so I opted for another 2 carrot), and attempted some serious reconstructive surgery at home by gluing them together with frosting...only then I realized that I was still missing some height to make it even with the other part of the cake! 
So then I ended up shaving off part of a layer from the cracked cake (the cracked part that didn't fall on the floor!) and putting it between the layers of store cake to give it more height! It was a terrible experience, but once the whole thing was totally iced over, no one was the wiser...
The worst part is that when we served the cake, I began by cutting my banana side first, and then served the store bought carrot side second. I felt like crying all over again when people came back asking for seconds of the delicious carrot cake!!! I did get credit for the "cool" idea of combining two different flavours in one cake though... 
Good luck to you!! I'm sure you can pull it off!! Let us know how it goes!
I have decided to bake another 10" chocolate layer to fix the height problem. It will set me back in terms of time, but I can't just leave it as is.
Now if the cake gods would only smile on me so I can repair that cracked layer...
If the tier isn't tall enough, use a 1/2" piece of foam core as the base. Cut it to exactly the same size as the cake and ice over it like it's part of the cake. No need to rebake.
Hi everyone,
Here is the finished product. I'm totally happy with how it turned out (despite all the trouble!)
http://cakecentral.com/modules.php?name=gallery&file=displayimage&pid=1852903
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