Blueberries for Sal

My mother-in-law's birthday is on September 11th. What an awful day for a birthday!! It's so hard to celebrate when the entire country is remembering one of its greatest sorrows. As part of her gift, and in an attempt to bring a little cheer to the day, I said I would make the cake.

Blueberries are my mother-in-law's favorite. I decided to make her a cake that had blueberries in it somehow. I scoured the Internet for hood recipes. I checked all my favorite food blogs. Finally, I settled on this recipe for a Blueberry Lemon Cake from the food blog Sweetapolita.

The cake was completely by scratch, which I loved. In hindsight I really should have picked something a bit less ambitious. I was looking for a recipe that I would have excelled making in my pre-baby life. In my post baby life I have so much less time. Also, I really seem to have less brain power. I'm always forgetting things.

Needless to say, the blueberry from scratch cake was an absolute mess. It was supposed to be a three layer cake, but I didn't distribute the batter very well. Two layers were too thin and one was too big. The cake itself was so dense. I’m pretty sure I did something wrong. Actually, I think I know exactly what I did wrong. I forgot to buy sour cream. Instead of going back to the store I tried to “make” it with lemon juice and whipping cream. I’m not sure if that worked. Or maybe I mixed in too much flour one time. Whatever it was, the cake was much denser than I had expected.

Regardless, it tasted good so I kept plugging along. I had decided to use the big layer on the bottom and the two smaller ones for the middle and top. As I cut into the top of biggie to level him out, I noticed the middle was kinda gooey. It hadn’t cooked all the way though. I had checked three times that it was cooked before taking it out! Maybe I could just scoop out the middle and fill it with lemon curd or frosting I thought. Once I started scooping I realized that there was a very small ring of cake around the outside that had actually cooked properly. The only thing this layer was good for was the trash, and that’s where it went.

Panic ensued. I frantically looked through the cupboards for a white cake mix. I thankfully had all the ingredients. I mixed it up, threw in a little lemon flavoring and put it in the oven. It cooked up beautifully….of course. The new plan was to put the remaining lemon and blueberry (cakes as one layer) between the box cakes.  It looked okay (precociously leaned to one side) and tasted GREAT! Cutting it was another story. The lemon blueberry middle was much harder to cut then the top two layers. It kind of made each piece topple over. Whatever.

Because I knew I wouldn't be able to make a cake and decoratively frost it I made a little pennant garland for the top. I made it out of paint chips. I thought the cake came out really nice considering all the trouble I had with it.  What do you think?