Holiday Open House!

Since when does Santa wear glasses? With the Grand Baby. 

Yesterday the hubby and I threw open our doors and invited in a lot of friends--a steady stream of them, and we had a ball.  So nice to spend a little time with folks we see throughout the year but don't always have time to visit.  So I spread out the fruits of more than three days of baking, people came, and they ate--but not nearly enough.  :-)   I'm boxing up the leftovers and taking many of them to my daughter, as we're leaving to go see the Grand Baby this afternoon.

But I wanted to share one baking experience with you.  I hope you realize that in writing this blog, I'm not attempting to be an expert on anything--far from it.  But if my experiments, successes, and failures can spur your enjoyment of baking, so much the better.

The unfortunate cake. Ugh. 

Because it occurs to me that we bake because we love.  And nothing pleases us better than to see the recipients of our endeavors take a bit, close their eyes, and sigh happily.  I tell you, that just lights the burners of my heart.  ;-)

Anyway--I sent aside most of Friday afternoon to bake a three layer sweet 'n salty cake.  I'd made one before, for my book club, and it came off without a hitch.  In fact, it was absolutely delicious, attractive, and not too hard to make, so I thought I'd replicate the effort for the open house.

LOL!  All went well until I began to assemble the cooled cake layers.  Layer one went on the platter without mishap, but layer two cracked right down the middle.  Uh oh.  I tried to "glue" it together with the caramel that goes on top of each layer, but when layer three cracked as well, I knew I was in trouble.  I glued and stuck it in the fridge, hoping the glue would harden, but when I pulled it out the the fridge, I found that the broken layer had spilled into the platter.

Into a pretty Christmas bowl, sprinkled with chips. 

Oh, dear.  The more I tried to glue and frost with caramel and the chocolate ganache frosting, the bigger my mess became.  My cake finally looked like the photo, and of course, I couldn't serve that.  (Thought for a moment about cutting it in half and serving HALF a cake, but not even my halves looked good).  So finally I scooped up layers of the cake, tossed them into a big bowl (too bad I don't have a trifle bowl), sprinkled the chocolate with chocolate chips, covered with whipped cream, then piped big chocolate rosettes atop the entire thing.  The cling wrap sort of squashed the rosettes, but no one minded after the first spoonful.

Toward the end of the party, my across the street neighbor mentioned that the "sweet and salty trifle" was her favorite thing, so I promptly handed her the bowl and told her to enjoy the rest of it.  :-0  

Add a topping of cool whip. 

And so . . . part of the art of baking, me thinks, is being creative enough to come up with an alternative when everything goes wrong.

Happy baking at your house!

And voila! A sweet and salty trifle. 

~~Angie