The ugliest cake ever

I made the ugliest birthday cake today for our head paralegal. I baked a 1997 Joy of Cooking sour cream fudge cake, but the bottom layer stuck a little when I tried to get it out of the pan, so I had to glue it together with frosting. The top layer was fine, but when I tried to frost it this morning, the butter in the cream cheese frosting was too soft, and the whole mess just dripped down the side, and wouldn’t stay in soft billowy folds.

So… creative disguise to the rescue. I colored the rest of the frosting a pretty pink, and put just enough on the sides to create a sticky surface. The frosting was fine on top, so I then took the bottle of pastel starry sprinkles and tossed them at the sides of the cake, rotating it all the while, in the hope that the stars would disguise the truly awful frosting job I’d done.

Fortunately, I seem to have succeeded. Our paralegal was happy to have a homemade cake, and liked the flavor of the frosting so much that she asked me if there was any more, by any chance. (There was– I had put the remainder in tupperware to bring with me just in case.) And the boys teased me about the pink color of the frosting– but as the paralegal’s a girly-girl, pink was the only choice.

Hooray for extra frosting and sprinkles, the baker’s equivalent of Julia Child’s old standby, chopped parsley!