Cakes are special. Every birthday, every celebration ends with something sweet–a cake–and people remember. It’s all about the memories. -Buddy Valasco, Cake Boss
Having too much time on my hands can be a dangerous thing, because then I’m sometimes tempted to think there is all the time in the world to accomplish something, even if I’ve never attempted it before. Such was the case this week, my second week of vacation. I think I was getting bored and needed a challenge. Well, I certainly found it.
All birthdays warrant a cake, but those who have a birthday on New Year’s Eve deserve a special cake, and I was determined to bake one for my husband that he’d never forget. As it turned out, I won’t either, but that is beside the point. So after pouring over a lot of recipes on the Internet, I decided on one on Allrecipes.com that had not only received a five-star rating, but had received more than twelve hundred reviews. One thousand two hundred forty, to be exact. I figured it would require a lot of time to make because of the many steps involved, but I had the time and am fairly good at following directions. Or so I thought.
My husband’s most favorite dessert in the world is tiramisu, but I have never attempted to make it. Everything about tiramisu just seems too complicated, from all the ingredients to all the steps involved. At least one time in the past though, the thought must have crossed my mind because deep in recesses of the kitchen pantry I uncovered a trifle bowl that had never been used.
At my age, I really thought that I knew myself pretty well, but I seem to forget, conveniently perhaps, that I have ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity disorder.) This isn’t an excuse, merely a fact. There have been so many times that I’ve put something in the oven only to turn around and see an ingredient or two, carefully measured in a bowl or ramekin, still sitting on the counter. That causes me to have flashbacks to more than fifty years ago, recalling teachers returning assignments, admonishing me to thoroughly read the directions and re-do the work. I guess some things just never change. I can totally identify with Homer Simpson when he frustratingly blurts out his infamous “D’oh!” All this is to say that I have trouble paying attention to detail.
I don’t think I have ever spent as much time preparing to make a recipe as much as I did for this one. First I read twenty or so of the reviews and even took notes; then I researched substitutions that could be made for the mascarpone (that was nowhere to be found in Hopkinsville) and the liqueur I wanted to leave out; and then I had to double- and triple-check to make certain that I had all the necessary ingredients. I even took to heart one review that advised allowing enough time for the liquid to adequately “infuse” the layers of cake, which required taking a look the calendar and figuring out exactly when this cake needed to be baked so that it would be ready in time. To say that this was a production is an understatement.
Without getting into the particulars, let me just insert right now that the published prep time of five minutes was a gross estimate. In retrospect, that was about how long it took just to get the ingredients out of the pantry and refrigerator. Good grief, it took at least one of those minutes to separate the three egg whites from their yolks! All in all, the finished product took at least six hours from start to finish, not counting a major screw-up in the very beginning (attributed to my failure to read the directions all the way through beforehand) that prompted dashing to the grocery store for another box of white cake mix. And only after the whipped cream frosting had been applied and garnished with cocoa did I realize I had skipped another step…a portion of the cream should have been added to the filling that was now separating the three layers of cake. D’oh!
As challenging as baking this tiramisu cake was, I’ve already decided that someday I’ll make it again. Even though it wasn’t done perfectly, I learned a lot, and doing anything for the first time is rarely done perfectly anyway. After all, it’s not the easy lessons that cause us to grow, but the difficult ones that make us stretch beyond our perceived limitations. Actually, the fact that the finished product looked pretty darn impressive and tastes like a slice of heaven made that decision very easy to make!
