**also to be referred to as "Don't trust your oven" and "A nifty lesson in not wasting food"

Yearly, our family has a special celebration to commemorate the anniversary of our family business. During the celebration, we invite Buddhist monks to come chant and perform a blessing. Part of this blessing ritual naturally involves food. So everyone usually helps out and cooks for it. It's pretty much your basic Thai spread of goodies, papaya salad, barbecue chicken, sticky rice, laab and some other things, included in that are of course Thai desserts. I decided that this year I wanted to do something different. I was going to make bread and cake. The bread I pulled off rather quickly. I made quick whole wheat and molasses bread that my current baking partner in crime sent me in exchange for the no knead bread virius I infected her with. If you haven't already tried it, it's damn good and worth a trip to the store to get whole wheat flour (btw, one bag of whole wheat flour will give you 5 loaves of bread -- I bought the flour less than a week ago and I've already used it up. Made a loaf for myself, one for B's family, one for each of my aunts and one for the blessing. I didn't eat it all up myself!). And the cake I decided on was the Red Velvet cake again from "More from Magnolia."

I started becoming more serious with my baking ever since the great Christmas gift of 2006, the pistachio green KitchenAid mixer. I've been reading around a bit and also experimenting. One of the things I've learned is that your oven may be lying to you. Not only do I have a hot spot in the back left of my oven, but my oven isn't always as hot as it says it is. So I purchased an oven thermometer to keep it in check. And adjusting the oven temperature as necessarily. The oven is nice and consistent with cupcakes, given that I only bake one pan at a time, but at this point I'm not so sure about cakes.

I decided to bake the cakes the night before and frost them in the morning. When I put the cakes in, the oven was at 350. Popped all three pans in and shut the door. I was pretty quick about it as not so the oven wouldn't loose too much heat. Five minutes later I checked and the oven was at 300. I freaked out so I upped the temp to 400 just to get the heat back up again. Another five minutes passed and the temp was at 450, holy charred cupcakes! So I knocked the temp down to 300 and opened the oven door for a while to let some of the heat escape. Another 5 minutes went by and could already smell a slight burnt odor. Peaking into the oven, I see that the cake in the back left is looking very lopsided, really flat at where the corner is. So I spin it around and then wait 5 more minutes befoore rotating the pans. Things aren't looking too good at this point as the other cakes are also showing signs of being charred. The cakes finally come out and I already know that I'll have to start over. Not only were lots of the edges burnt, but they were charred.

The next morning I woke up early to get to the store to pick up more cake flour. I proceeded as I did the night before except that I preheated the oven to 375, put in the cakes and then dropped the temp to 350. Everything went much more smoothly this time. I baby sat the oven but the temp ended up staying consistent. The cakes looked awesome and no burning smell was detected. The only thing wrong with the cakes were that they weren't very level.

I decided not to even out the layers by slicing the tops off. I didn't want a short cake, nor did I want to mess up. So I decided to handle it by strategically placing the layers on so that the cake evened itself out.

When I was icing the cakes, I noticed that one of the layers was a lot smaller in diameter than the others, and also that when I pulled it out of the pan, it had pulled away from the sides and had more browned edges. One of my pans is lying to me (I guess that's what happens when you have 3-9" pans purchased at different times). Anyways, I tried to hide that by putting that layer at the bottom. I'm not so sure that it was the smartest thing to do as I had a hard time icing the sides. Frosting cakes isn't as easy as I thought it would be. The filling and top is easy, but the sides were my downfall. I was trying to be as even as I could, making everything as smooth as possible. As hard as I tried, I couldn't hide the ridge of the second layer, but I blame that on the shrunken bottom later. Now that I look back on it, I probably should have went for the fluffy, highly "wavey" frosting style that they showed in photo. It probably would have hidden that ridge a lot beter. Oh well. For my first attempt at baking a cake from scratch from start to finish, including the frosting, I don't think I did too bad.

The verdict from the masses? We shall see. The cake didn't get done in time for the blessing but I dropped it off last night and they should be cutting into it today. I've used this recipe to make cupcakes and they turned out great. So I'm hoping it goes over well with them. I think they might be put off by it since it's a red cake and not strawberry.

Once the cake was done, I still had 3 layers left from the second attempt. I didn't want to just throw it out since only the edges were burnt and the middles were perfectly fine. I had a lightbulb moment and decided to make a mini-cake with it by cutting off the burnt edges.

The first thing I did was find a round object I could use as a cookie cutter. I found a tuperware that was the perfect size, centered it over the cake and pressed down until I cut through the entire layer.

It worked fine, but as I was pressing down on it, it dawned on me that tuperware isn't the accurate cutting tool since it's got a pretty blunt edge. As a result, the edges weren't very clean.

For the next two layers I used the tuperware only to mark a circle and used a serrated knife to do the cutting. Much better.

All three layers are done and I'm now left with some rings to snack on (the non-burnt parts of it at least).

I had a feeling that I wasn't going to have enough frosting to cover the entire mini-cake. At the very least, I wanted enough for the filling and the top layer. If Miette can get away with selling a partially frosted cake, referred to as a tomboy, why can't I?

I present to you yaiAnn's Red Velvet tomboy.

And it's mine, aaaall mine. mamaFasu would be proud, don't you think? (and I actally think it looks better than the regular cake -- click for size comparison.)