the ugly cake

If you come to my house for dinner, dessert will be one of three things:

1. An ice cream from a box;

2. Something you brought with you; or

3. Nothing.

You will get an awesome taco, curry, stirfry, Vietnamese bún bowl, smoked brisket or ribs, slow cooked smoky pulled pork, bitterballen (google it) or a really good traditional roast (just to name a few of my specialties)... just don't expect sweets.

Savoury cooking comes naturally to me. I wing it a lot, and 9/10 times it works beautifully. The odd occasion when I follow a recipe, I tweak like a legend.

But when it comes to sweets, I have zero instincts. I need to follow a recipe exactly, there is no winging it whatsoever, no tweaking not even a tiny bit... and I still screw it up.

So knowing that, you might wonder why every Easter I'm overcome by a really strong urge to bake all the things. Luckily this year wisdom prevailed and in recognition of my crap skills (and inspired by a cake-for-idiots 'recipe' in the Coles magazine), I bought a ready made, undressed mud cake. All I needed to do was make some icing, and decorate it.

How hard could it be?

Pretty hard, it turns out.

Ingredients

1 x Coles mud cake, undressed

125gm butter

1 1/2 cups icing sugar

1 tbs milk

1/2 tsp vanilla essence

1 pkt milk chocolate sticks

Chocolate bunnies & crispy shell Easter eggs

Step 1

Beat butter until pale

(so far so good)

Step 2

Sift icing sugar

Discover you're out of icing sugar

Drive back to supermarket, buy more, come home, continue

Add icing sugar and turn mixer up to high speed

Turn mixer off

Clean icing sugar from walls and benches

Add milk and vanilla, beat on medium speed until smooth & creamy

(a few hiccups, but... success!)

(full of cocky confidence... you know where this is going right?)

Step 3

Defrost 1/2 cup frozen raspberries in the microwave

They're hot now, but that's ok

Puree raspberries and fold through buttercream icing mixture

Watch it curdle, put it in the fridge to fix it

Doesn't work

Start again, omit step 3

Step 4

Scrounge around in the pantry for half a packet of white choc melts

Melt in the microwave, following the packet directions exactly with a view to adding it to the buttercream icing

Burn it anyway, accept defeat

Decorate the bloody cake and take a photo

Behold, my Pinterest fail. In my defense, my styling skills are severely impacted by our inability to go out hunting for props.

The 10 minute Easter mud cake

The 2 hour ugly cake Pinterest fail