A few years ago I made a cake for the first time in my life. I was already an expert bread maker, but I had never baked a cake. The idea came to me on Christmas Eve, early that day. My wife and I were cooking for six people that night. I had an interesting recipe for German Chocolate Cake. The recipe looked easy.
I’m American and my wife is Mexican. We were living in a very large Mexican city with Wal-Mart Super Centers and Sam’s Clubs, but the local market was much closer, so that is where we went to shop for our Christmas Eve celebration.
When I make a recipe for the first time, I usually follow the directions to the letter. The next time I’ll get even more creative. For this recipe I needed a combination of milk chocolate and bittersweet chocolate and unfortunately both were out of stock at the local mart. I could have wasted a hour or so driving to the chain stores to get the ingredients, but I decided against it. I trusted my intuition and chose two different kinds of chocolate.
As soon as I put the cake in the oven some friends stopped by to chat. I left the cake in too long, but that worked to my advantage. The snow capped mountains of Puebla, Mexico were right outside the front door. Since the oven was 15 years old the oven was never as hot as the thermostat indicated. Due to all of these factors the cake needed to stay in the oven longer that the recipe indicated.
The milk chocolate I used was too runny. The icing kept falling off of the cake. It tasted great, but it slid off the sides of the cake faster than I could spread it on again. I was running late, asking myself out loud why I had to do this today, of all days. My guest had pulled up to the house. As a last resort, I shoved the cake in the freezer in the hope that the icing would stay in one place.
To my amazement the cake was perfect once it got out of the freezer. It was more than perfect—it was an instant legend. No one will forget that special evening. I always get request to make that cake again. It would be tough to pull it off again. It is hard to top perfection, so why even try.
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