It's not that I don't make mistakes or screw up all the time, but seriously....burning a cake? A cake that I have made at least a dozen times? A cake made from the bounty of apples from my daughter's front yard? A cake that was to be served at a dinner for ten people? And I burned it? Holy cow. Now what? It's not like life gave me lemons and I made lemonade (a trite saying that I hate, by the way.) No, life gave me apples and I burned them.
Back to the cake. I did what any baker would do who didn't have time to bake another cake: I took a knife to the aforementioned burned cake. Once it cooled enough to handle, I gently flipped it upside down and roughly sawed off a quarter inch from the bottom part of the cake. Then I slowly shaved about an eighth of an inch off of the really dark parts of the side of the cake. There was nothing to be done about the too-brown apple pieces on the top, so those remained. Once the surgery was complete, the cake looked OK. Unless you had witnessed its sad coming-out-of-the-oven over doneness, you might not have known its major flaw, which was, of course, that it was burned. I felt a tiny bit bad about the overcooked situation but not bad enough to leave the cake behind. It came to the party with me.
No one suspected a thing! Once sliced, the cake looked perfect! And it tasted great, no hint of black edges, no burnt taste and people really liked it. Whew, crisis averted. Well, not really a crisis, of course. Who would really care if the cake had accidentally fallen into a muddy, wet ditch or had been trampled by a runaway horse or been stolen by a cake thief? One of those scenarios might have given the baker a great story to tell and that story might have been better than the actual apple cake desert.
Next time I will save the cake for myself and serve the guests an outlandish tale that they will eat up like pudding and be just as satisfied.
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