This was just not my weekend, folks. What I was anticipating as a nice, wonderful, relaxing weekend just never really unfolded. I'm not going to go into details of the stress ball that's become my life. I'll spare you that pain, but will go into what's relevant for the blog. Some unfortunate news came to my BFF's family this weekend. When I heard on Saturday evening, I decided to do what I do best and bake some sweets to take over to her to cheer her and her family up. She requested red velvet but I was short a couple ingredients and decided to make the yellow cake with dark chocolate buttercream from Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook instead. It's a pretty simple cake, but always a crowd pleaser, according to the book.

First thing's first, making the cake: I baked the cake and the batter wasn't so yellow, and neither was the finished cake. I did substitute one stick of the butter with a stick of margarine, earth balance, but I didn't think it would affect it that much.

Yellow? Not so much.

Second thing's second, making the frosting: As I was waiting for my Scharfenberger chocolate to melt in the double boiler, I mixed the 6 tablespoons of cocoa powder with 6 tablespoons of boiling water per the recipe, which should have dissolved the powder. It didn't. I added a bit more water.. but nothing, just a clumpy paste. So I chucked it, reboiled the water, and tried again. No bueno. Instead of using dutch processed, I used regular cocoa powder but didn't think that would have made a difference.

I decided to just keep the paste and hope for the best when I added it as the last ingredient. So now that the melted chocolate was cool enough, I was supposed to take three sticks of butter (two butter and one earth balance in my case) and beat it with caster sugar until it was light and fluffy. There's no photographic evidence of this step, but instead of becoming light and fluffy, the mixture came out smooth and creamy. It seemed like the sugar just disappeared into the butter! Okay not cool, but what do I do? I pressed on and added the melted chocolate hoping for the best. And perfection, the frosting was actually looking good. I stopped the mixer to scrape down the sides of the bowl and started it back up again. So as the mixer got going again, all I could see was clumps forming... more, and more, and more.. I was about to die. I stopped the mixer to dislodge the huge clump of frosting stuck to the paddle and it would barely budge when I pushed it with my spatula. What in the world was going on? I finally dislodged it, started the mixer up again and the clumps would NOT go away. I was about to cry. I tried slow and fast. Nothing. The frosting seemed to just stiffen up the more I beat it. And all I had left was a clump of craptastic (no pun intended) inedible chocolate frosting.

Make the clumps go away!

I wasted my last block of Scharfenberger on the frosting and had no more chocolate to start over. I debated on whether or not to make the Swiss buttercream, my first attempt, but decided not to. What if I flubbed that, too? I only had enough butter for one more batch of frosting. So what's left? I went to the Magnolia standby, the "lots'o'butter and lots'o'powdered sugar" vanilla buttercream. I added some yellow food color and that was that.

Cake Recipe: Yellow Cake, Martha Stewart Baking Handbook
Frosting Recipe: Vanilla Buttercream, More from Magnolia

Notes:
Martha, you do not know how bad I wanted to throw your cookbook out the window! I was so so so so frustrated with this cake attempt. I felt especially under pressure because I wanted it to be so good that it would make my BFF and her family temporarily forget about their current situation and be propelled into a sweet bliss. Now the cake wasn't bad at all, it just wasn't what I was originally intending (It also reconfirmed for me that the Magnolia frosting recipe is just way to sweet -- I think it's fine on a cupcake given that there's only one layer. But on a cake you've got much more surface area to cover). The process was just mentally draining for me. I'm not going to fully discount the recipe yet. I still want to give it another try with all the right ingredients, just not right now.

Martha, you're safe for the moment.