I posted the pictures of the cake I made for my sisters birthday, it was a pirate ship, chocolate cake, mocha icing...

Well there is a saga behind this cake!

I had decided I wanted to do this cake awhile ago, my sister loves pirates and chocolate, so I was going to make chocolate cake and chocolate buttercream.

So I got all the ingredients and accessories I needed, my husband told me he had a can of ghirardelli's powdered chocolate that he uses to make his Klah, which is a hot drink with chocolate, cinnimon, nutmeg and coffee.

So I bake the cakes and freeze them. Then I go to make the buttercream, it's my first time making chocolate BC, I put the chocolate powder in that my husband gave me and it is looking good, I go to taste it and the frosting tastes kind of bitter and gritty...hmm...I give it to him to taste he says it tastes good, but a little bitter. So I mix it more, and taste it again, and I distinctly taste coffee...so my husbands says to bring him the can of chocolate, opens it and tastes it and says "uhoh" and asking me to bring him some hot water, he mixes some and it is Klah! He had mixed all the stuff that goes into it in that can.

My sister loves coffee, so I figure I might be able to fix it, I add some more suger and vanilla and get it to a taste that I think is ok. But I was still having seconds thoughts about it...

I decide to go ahead and use the BC, and I fill the cake, put it in the fridge, frost the cake, make the little plank marks on the side, my husband made the sails for me, we put them on and the little pirate men we got. As an after thought I decide to use a graham cracker as a plank. Voila, I thought it looked really cute.

So we go to sleep, the next morning it's time to pack up to go to my parents house that is a little over an hour away. We put it in a box with some packing cushions on the bottom so it won't slide all over the place.

Before we leave my husband comments that the plank is looking kind of saggy because of the humidity in the house. I decide I'll replace it, I start to pull the plank out and the top of the cake starts to crack, so I push it back in and leave it in.

Well as we are driving the spot the plank was in starts to crack more and more, one of the pirates falls off the cake. Then the cookies on that side fall off, then the front of the cake starts to crack...it is slowly coming apart.

My husband and I joke that it looks like the ship took canon fire, but it still looks fixable. No such luck, it starts to crack where the masts are, and by the time we get there it had fallen apart in four sections, it didn't look at all like a pirate ship!!

The upside is that it tasted wonderfully! The frosting was great, I have to figure out the recipe for it now! And I showed my family the picture of what the cake looked like.

So it was a learning experiance, and it did taste really good I survived my first cake disaster! Although I haven't tried to make another one since.

Barbara

Atleast you got the picture before you moved the cake. That would have been a shame. I think the cake is great!!!

That cake was awesome!! What a great idea for a cake. If you decide to make another one sometime, you could try a recipe for a more dense cake...maybe a chocolate pound cake?

Soooo cute! You should send that picture to Family Fun Magazine. Boys would love the pirate theme. You don't see that every day.

Oh I feel so bad for you!! At least you had a good attitude about it that it tasted so good!! I've had "issues" like this, when you just want to throw your hands in the air and say FORGET IT! At least it was for family right??