Dessert Disaster

All right, I’ll admit it. I’m a gadget geek. I love computers, peripherals, cameras. I love knitting needles and the doodads that make knitting fun and easy. And I love kitchen droids that buzz and beep.

I have two new additions to my kitchen appliance arsenal. My Breadman breadmaker and my Cuisinart ice cream maker. More on the ice cream maker on another post. This post is about my Breadman breadmaker.

The Breadman breadmaker comes with a recipe booklet, and it suggests beginners start with white bread. So I have been happily making white bread for about two weeks now and my family is spoiled. They love the fresh bread smell, they love having bread ready all the time. I love having basic bread that doesn’t have ingredients I can’t pronounce, and I love not having to knead the dough myself and worry about it not rising. Believe me, I’ve tried making bread the old fashioned way, and it’s never worked for me.

Anyway, this past Friday I thought it was time to graduate to making something else other than white bread on my breadmaker. I leafed through the recipe booklet and decided on carrot cake. Mmmm… I love carrot cake!

The recipe seemed easy enough.

Put ingredients in the pan in the order listed in the recipe booklet, wet ingredients first. Set the droid to dessert and press start.

Clean up the sides of the pan with a spatula and wait over an hour for 8 beeps. Woo-hoo! While waiting I was working on the frosting. It was all very exciting until…

I got the cake out and it crumbled. There was no way to get the cake out of the vertical pan without shaking it a bit. I learned that when it comes to cakes, it’s better to do it the old fashioned way, in a horizontal cake pan, treated like the fragile baby that cake is.

There’s no reason to let all that cake and frosting go to waste, though. Here it is all frosted and decorated.

My family still loved it no matter what. A little sugar goes a long way!