The Angry Baker

So Gary said I should change my blog name to The Angry Baker. He has a point. When things don't go smoothly I get frustrated really fast. Last night I was trying to bake a chocolate cake for a family my small group is providing thanksgiving dinner for. I had this picture in my mind of a chocolate cake with a yellow boarder and orange and yellow roses and Happy Thanksgiving written on it. An autumn looking cake. Well, chocolate buttercream frosting just doesn't smooth out as well as the regular. It would have been better if I just smoothed it on with the spatula. Instead I put it is the fridge like you would with regular butter cream. Then tried to "iron" out the icing. Well it just made the icing look more crackly. For my perfectionist personality this annoys the crap out of me! Then I made regular butter cream frosting a dyed it for the colors I needed to decorate the cake. Well I put like 1 tsp too much water in because it was not stiff enough to make the flowers. They looked awful and I just threw all the icing out. This morning I had another go at it. This time the icing was really stiff and the flowers turned out nicely. The cake is decent looking, but it would have been much better if I hadn't tried smoothing out the chocolate frosting. I would make it all over again just because of that, but it would be a ton of wasted supplies. Plus it takes hours to make a cake, frosting it, and decorate it with flowers. I just don't want to go through the flower making again.
I did make another cake this morning for myself and used the leftover chocolate frosting I had in the fridge. I sat the frosting out on the stove while the oven was on baking the cake. This helped warm up the frosting so it wasn't so hard. Then I just used a spatula to smooth it on the cake when it was still slightly warm. It went on very smoothly and nicely...much better looking then sticking it in the fridge and then trying to iron out the creases. Oh well, live and learn.
Don't think professional cake decorating is in my future. Way to stressful for my perfectionist personality and I just don't think I am good enough. It isn't even enjoyable to decorate cakes when you worry and get upset so much because they didn't turn out right. Think I will stick with my cookies and brownies...I'm not much of a cake eater anyway :)