I am the MacGuyver of baking!

I may not be the best baker ever, but sometimes I think I'm the cleverest. :-)

I have a tendency to produce baked goods that are perfectly edible, even delicious, but tend to come out broken or misshapen or otherwise not in the physical form they should be. As I mentioned, I wanted to make red velvet moon pies for Jared as an early Valentine's treat, because he's going on his ski vacation tomorrow. You may know these little frosting and cake sandwiches as whoopie pies; my grandmother called them gobs. But this particular package, sent to me by my mother from Williams-Sonoma, wasn't turning out the way I expected. The batter and the frosting were thicker and grainier than I thought they'd be, possibly because I had only an eletric beater rather than a stand mixer. I also didn't have the proper form pan to make the cakes in. I can't imagine who actually would buy a pan of such limited application as to be specifically for moon pies. So the alternative was to just make little one-and-a-half-inch mounds of batter on parchment paper on a cookie sheet. This was tough, since the batter was so thick and sticky, and it was hard to gauge if they were the right size or not. Still, I threw them in the oven and hoped for the best. Ten minutes later, my batter had baked nicely but spread out into formless ugly cake-blobs. That's when I had my stroke of genius. I didn't have a biscuit cutter, which would have been ideal, but I found a half-cup measuring cup with just about the right circumference. I used this cup to cut out properly-sized circular rounds out of my hideous little cake monstrosities. This made them look the way they were supposed to, and they were a lot easier to stack into sandwiches! Didn't taste half-bad, either. :-) And I was very pleased to present Jared with not only delicious but appetizing-looking snackies. I am glad to report that he enjoyed them.

It reminded me of the time I baked a two-layer mocha cake that broke into a million pieces when I tried to extract it from the cake pan. I rescued this from disaster by chopping it up, putting it into individual bowls, squirting in some hot fudge, topping it with whipped cream, and calling it brownie pudding. :-) I actually considered doing something like this with the scraps of cake cut off from the moon pies, but there weren't much of them, and they were the driest parts of the cakes anyway, so I didn't bother. But I'm proud of my ability to salvage broken or misshapen but otherwise tasty baked goods. I know taste is more important than appearence when it comes to food, but nothing makes something seem more appetizing than a nice presentation. And I'm pleased I can find ways to salvage presentation when things go awry.