(Un)happy birthdays

I have officially decided: I don't like making cakes. Specifically, I am tired of trying to make a dinosaur cake for Andrew's birthday tomorrow. After doing some research to find a good cake recipe on Food Network, Andrew and I excitedly mixed the cake before I sent him off to bed. I baked the cake in our specially ordered dinosaur cake pan (it boiled over the edge of the cake pan onto the floor of the oven) and set it on the rack to cool off.

While the cake cooled, I scraped out the oven, and then set myself to the task of turning the cake out of the pan. This, of course, is where the trouble began. Rather than coming out in one seamless whole (though I had greased and floured the pan beforehand), the cake seemed determined to come out in chunks. Delicious chunks, true, but nothing resembling a dinosaur.

Daunted, but undeterred, I consulted with Dan and we decided that we'd grease and flour the pan more aggressively, add a little extra flour to the mix to compensate for the high altitude, and cook the cake a little longer. I learned from the first round mistakes, too: I didn't fill the pan as full, and I put a pizza pan underneath the cake pan. The second time, the cake boiled over again (though not as badly), but again refused to come out of the pan. That is, most of the cake came out, but the top layer (incidentally the layer that gives shape to the whole cake) remained stubbornly in the pan.

By this point, it was nine p.m.; I was tired, my voice was going (the tail end of a cold), and I wanted to sit down on the floor and cry. I didn't, of course. I'm a grown up now, and grown ups don't (at least, they don't often admit to it) as a rule act like four-year-olds. Instead, I vented my frustration by sweeping up the crumbs, throwing the entire second cake away (we saved the pieces from the first one) and scrubbing the pan it died in.

Luckily for me, I have a wonderful husband who quietly took control: he went to the store and got a boxed cake mix (two of them, actually, in case the first one fails), which he is currently mixing. With any luck, Andrew won't ever know about all the cake mishaps, and his birthday tomorrow will go much more smoothly than the nightly preparations have gone tonight.

Of course, I still have to frost the darned thing.