Even when you fail, it’s still delicious

It turns out, cakes that fail still have the same amount of sugar, butter, oil, chocolate, strawberries, candy, crumbled oreos, caramel, and walnuts as those buoyant Instagram cakes we all hate ourselves for comparing ourselves to. Or Pinterest, if you’re my mom.

My rum raisin icing wasn’t supposed to curdle, but after Andy tried the recipe twice, he gave up. Turns out: I was still delicious!

Yours Truly,

Curdelia, a.k.a., Ottolenghi’s Rum Raisin Bundt Cake from Sweet.

As my adventures with fudge-fingeredness are well-documented, I’ll remind you that most of the fun of baking is the eating. The rest of the fun is trying new things and measuring. There are few things better than discovering new flavor combinations, surprising yourself with unique tastes that redefine how you approach the world… and getting exactly 198 grams of sugar in a bowl (as a reference, that’s my standard measure for 1 cup of sugar).

So don’t worry if your icing curdles, your cake falls, or you accidentally mistake a tsp of extract with a Tbsp. Push yourself out of your comfort zone and dare to fail. We don’t learn until we push ourselves beyond our limits. Maybe I’ll write that mantra sloppily on a cake with some leftover icing I have in my fridge.

Don’t judge. I’m learning.

P.S. I suggest after every bake you have a little debrief with yourself and with the people you’ve forced it upon. We’re often our harshest critics, but if you can figure out what went wrong, you’ll have a new something wrong to do next bake! Baking is basically science, and science is basically failing over and over until you can figure out why you keep failing.

I’m the first attempt at Rum Raisin Bundt. You’d think Andy would have learned something between the batches, but he didn’t… sometimes you don’t learn anything and just slowly close the cookbook and eat the evidence before anyone’s the wiser. Also, yes, those are antibacterial wipes from when we were wiping down Amazon purchases. Oh, 2020! What a year?