Today is my birthday. This wasn’t exactly the post I’d intended to write up, but sometimes life throws you a curve ball and you just have to roll with it.

As many of you know by now, I bake myself a cake for my birthday every year because no one but me can be trusted with anything as important as cake. Some years I go with an old favourite, some years I find a new recipe. This year I decided to go with something new. I knew I wouldn’t have time to make it today, so I made it yesterday.

In preparation I painstakingly scoured the internet last week (i.e. spent 20 minutes randomly scrolling through assorted cooking websites) to select this year’s recipe. I picked Ina Garten’s Beatty’s Chocolate Cake because I found an article where someone tested four popular chocolate cake recipes and this one came out on top. “Hey,” I thought, “this sounds like a winner.”

I printed the recipe. I bought the ingredients. I was all psyched up to bake today. I prepared the cake pans, mixed the ingredients, poured the batter into the pans, placed them in the oven, and set the timer. All was well. But then…

Catastrophe!

So here’s what happened… The pans overflowed in the oven. Made a big mess. You see, I did have a passing thought as I was filling the cake pans that they seemed a little too full of batter. “No!” I told myself. “Ina Garten knows how to bake a cake! Trust the recipe!” I double checked the recipe to make sure it said two 8″ cake pans like I thought it said, and not 9″ pans, or three 8″ pans. Nope, I was correct. Two 8″ cake pans. “Trust the recipe!” I chuckled as I placed the pans in the oven.

35 minutes, one house full of smoke (uh, someone remind me today to change the smoke detector batteries because it did not go off), and one very messy oven later, here we are.

And now I present, in all its glory, this year’s magnificent birthday cake:

This is the carnage that was left once I removed the parts that hadn’t baked through in the molten chocolate lava flood that overtook the oven.

Ina did this to me on purpose, I know she did.

Disappointed, I weighed my options. I could toss it all in frustration and go out and buy a cake. Or say to heck with this nonsense altogether. Or grab a cake mix out of the cupboard and do a quickie slab cake or cupcakes. Or I could make a half recipe of the icing and try to patch together something vaguely resembling a single-layer cake and make the best of it.

But then…

A tiny little voice in the back of my head…

Trifle.

Trifle?

YES. TRIFLE.

I tore that cake to bits and put it in a big bowl, made some chocolate custard, and busted out my trusty stash of Ye Olde Canne O’ Spray Whipp’d Creme. (Keeping a can stashed in the fridge for dessert-related emergencies has pulled my butt out of the fire more times than I care to admit.)

Trifle, as it turns out, hides a lot of baking sins.

Here, again in all its glory, if not in its intended form, is this year’s birthday cake dessert, Emergency Chocolate Trifle:

It was delicious. The chocolate custard (that you can just see peeking out over on the right) is my usual custard recipe that I threw some cocoa into. The cake is lovely with a nice soft texture and chocolate flavour. And I have plenty of leftovers to eat today. Someday I will try this cake recipe again, because I do very much want to try it with the icing, except I’d split the batter into three pans instead of two.

And that is how you recover from a baking disaster and save your own birthday from yourself.

Now go forth and post, and tell me about your best cooking and baking fails.