cake: FAIL

I've been buried in adoption paperwork for the past couple of weeks, and thought about blogging about it, but, it's really not that exciting, filling out applications and autobiographies. I am quite proud of the family scrapbook that I'm working on so the birth mother has something to look at and get to "know" us, but it's not finished, and I could type for days about that book and this paperwork but if I'm sick of reading and writing about myself, don't want my blog audience to get sick of me too. So off to write about and yet another disastrous dessert attempt. And, I have pictures, which always makes for more interesting blog reading.

Remember last year when I tried TWICE to make cookies for our new neighbor and messed them up both times?? Well today, I was set to make a dessert for a family at church. As part of the Mercy Meals ministry, we provide meals for families that need help with a birth in the family, or sickness, stuff like that. Others were making the meal for this particular family, so I said I would do the dessert. Since it was not a dessert for us, I decided to go whole hog and find something really GOOD (read: lots of butter and not low fat), so I found a chocolate cake recipe in the Pioneer Woman cookbook (great cookbook, great blog by the way). I melted butter and cocoa, I put in the eggs, I did it all, and poured the yummy concoction into a 17 inch jelly roll pan. I then turned to my oven. My dumb, too small oven. Totally forgot that our tiny oven cannot hold that size of a pan!! Drats. I remembered in the cookbook she said you could make cupcakes too, so, I pulled out the muffin tins. Didn't have any baking cups, but sprayed them really well. Now, I just had to pour the mixture from a JELLY ROLL PAN into muffin tins. Yeah, a really easy task. I tried to ladle it off the pan into the tins, pour at an angle....it was a mess. The dessert was quickly going downhill, along with the possibility that it would see the light of day in a friend's home. I managed to get a tin filled and put it in the oven. It was now time to make the icing, the icing that called for a POUND of powdered sugar. I thought, well, what the heck, might as well make it and see if I can ice these suckers. Well, I didn't read the part where you weren't supposed to fill the tins as much as you would with regular cupcakes, because you have to pour this really thin icing on top. So I poured the icing onto the mound of the cupcakes, which of course spilled down the sides of the cupcakes, leaving the tops empty at times, and icing all over the pan. Here are those beauties:

And of course, they wouldn't come out of the pan nicely by any means. I ate one straight from the pan with a fork. Pretty tasty actually. And for someone who loves sugar (a little too much), I actually thought the icing was too sweet!

Here's what it's supposed to look, a picture from the cookbook (it's not that great of a picture, taken with the phone):

Annnnnnd, here's a picture of what the family REALLY got for their dessert tonight:

Tres Leches cake from Kroger, and some cute puppy cupcakes.