Monday, September 24, 2012

Frankencake- Where Pinterest goes Wrong

Don't you just love Pinterest?  All those great looking pictures for all those great tasting recipes?  Maybe Pinterest is just about looking at pictures.  I know that's what some people do, they spend hours upon hours just looking.  And drooling. I'm sure they drool. How can they not?
When Pinterest first became popular among my friends, I vowed to do more with it than just waste time.  After all, I was wasting so much time doing other useless things, I would need to be more effective in my time management skills to have more time to waste.  So I decided to actually MAKE the things I pinned on Pinterest.  It has been so lovely.  I've taken up quilting, and have baked and cooked some lovely meals.  It seemed like a dream come true.  Pinterest was making me better.
But then, everybody started pinning.  There were so many pins to choose from, its hard not to pin the same thing twice!  And now...  it appears that not all the recipes are as good as they look!  I've even seen some pins with little flags that say "Pinstrosity"!  A new word made up for these awful, miserable recipe failures. In fact, there's a whole website dedicated to these failures (see here) Well, I've had a few that were not as delicious as I would have expected, but I have to tell you about my friend Cracker, and her fantastic FRANKENCAKE!

Cracker's son (We'll call him Crumb) had a birthday.  He requested a cake based on a beautiful picture he found on Pinterest.  Cracker read through the recipe and thought to herself: is that a typo?  could there really be 1 1/2 cups of oil in a cake?  and 5 eggs?  and jello???  After a phone conversation, and consulting the not so good reviews of this recipe, Cracker doubled the recipe, except for the oil and egg.  Within a few hours, this is what I saw on Facebook:  

Today's life lesson: If a recipe looks like a disaster, walks like a disaster, and quacks like a disaster, then it IS a disaster. Worst thing I've ever baked!

I'm not sure what a disaster quacks like, but I needed to know more...  so another phone conversation to find out that the cake flopped out of the pans into the bottom of the oven during cooking, was flat in the middle, wouldn't come out of the pan, and tasted very oily, I asked her if she wanted a different recipe... maybe for something different.  But it was late, so she decided to save the cake, frost it, and present it like it were a masterpiece at the birthday dinner.  

Here's her pictures:

Figuring Gas-X might be the perfect after cake treat?

Happy Birthday Crumb! Hope you enjoy your 10 pound Frankencake (and the gas-x)

What a beautiful picture.  The cake is so perfect, green, and crooked.  
Are you curious as to which recipe this is?  This my friends, is Tricia Yearwood's Key Lime Cake.  You can find the recipe here.  Poor Heidi, if she does really bake, did you make this cake?  I also found the recipe on Food Network's site, and the comments there were quite poor too.  
You should know that Crumb politely claimed that the cake was "really good", and that other family members ate it up (some requesting seconds).  Sadly, I live too far away from Cracker and her family to have the opportunity to taste the Frankencake.  I can't tell you how sad I am.  Almost sad enough to buy the ingredients to make it flop in my oven...  but not quite.

Remember when I first started blogging, I said I'd love to be on Pinterest?  Well, not so much anymore.  I can tell you one thing. I will not be making any cakes that call for 1 1/2 cups of oil or jello.  Unless I've gone mad.  That could happen.

5 comments:

  1. I'm so honored having my cake featured in your blog. I think my family members were telling little green lies when they said they liked it. How else could half a cake be left over when there were 12 people at the table?

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  2. Fair and balanced treatment of the much bemoaned disaster from last week's episode of Kitchen Nightmares, Moo View Edition!

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  3. I enjoyed reading the tale. Thanks for sharing :)

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  4. before you "pin" something you must always click on it to see if it takes you to an actual site and directions and yes read comments. saves a lot of needless pinning.

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    1. What's the fun in that?? I'd have nothing to blog about ;)

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