Venting here…

I’ve made 3 different 12"x18” marble cakes today, all of which have completely failed the taste/texture category.  Ugh.  I’m totally disgusted.  I have a 2 tiered marble cake due tomorrow at 2pm and I’m on my FIFTH cake recipe attempt.  I’m barely breaking even at this point. 

I’m also making a huge buttermilk cake (due tomorrow too) and apparently I way OVER calculated the recipe, even though I checked my math about 50 times.  I’ve decided to fold in some cooled melted chocolate to part of the extra batter and make a small test marble cake.  Crossing my fingers this works as it’s only 12 hours away from delivery.

I wish you the best…that sounds incredibly frustrating.  I checked my books and I don’t have a recipe to share (I assume you have used Rose’s recipes).  Good luck!!

Have you tried Flo Braker’s, “Baking For All Occasions”? She has a recipe which she bakes in a 13 x 4 pullman but says it can be baked in other pans. It looks amazing.

Should add that your small test cake (even if it turns out) may not work in a larger pan (hate to say that, but it’s often true).  Are you using a flower nail to help bake the centre faster as a 12” x 18” is a large cake.

I wish you the best of luck, hope it all works out in the end!

If nothing else works, for a sheet cake of that size you might want to consider making two separate cake batters and swirling them together, rather than mixing in melted chocolate to a portion of the yellow batter.  The melted chocolate is heavy and weakens the structure of the yellow cake batter, which may be an issue for the structure required for the large size of the half sheet pan.  For instance, if you were to make quarter-sheet size batters of yellow and chocolate butter cakes from the Rose Factor/ wedding cake section of the cake bible, then you could swirl them in your half sheet pan.  Use the baking powder level for the half sheet pans (level 6), even though you would be scaling to half the amount of batter necessary.

Flour Girl - 19 November 2011 11:22 AM

Have you tried Flo Braker’s, “Baking For All Occasions”? She has a recipe which she bakes in a 13 x 4 pullman but says it can be baked in other pans. It looks amazing.

I haven’t seen that recipe.  I’ll have to try it next time….. if there IS a next time.  I don’t want to hear, see or speak about marble cake for a loooong time. 

Sherrie - 19 November 2011 12:19 PM

Should add that your small test cake (even if it turns out) may not work in a larger pan (hate to say that, but it’s often true).  Are you using a flower nail to help bake the centre faster as a 12” x 18” is a large cake.

i anticipated the large cake being a diaster… I used two flour nails in the large pan.  But I also made a 8” square pan and it still sunk. 

Julie - 20 November 2011 06:46 AM

I wish you the best of luck, hope it all works out in the end!

If nothing else works, for a sheet cake of that size you might want to consider making two separate cake batters and swirling them together, rather than mixing in melted chocolate to a portion of the yellow batter.  The melted chocolate is heavy and weakens the structure of the yellow cake batter, which may be an issue for the structure required for the large size of the half sheet pan.  For instance, if you were to make quarter-sheet size batters of yellow and chocolate butter cakes from the Rose Factor/ wedding cake section of the cake bible, then you could swirl them in your half sheet pan.  Use the baking powder level for the half sheet pans (level 6), even though you would be scaling to half the amount of batter necessary.

Next time I think I’m going to just make two batters. I knew that the chocolate would make the vanilla batter less stable.. argh. 

I ended up just waking up early and going to my grocery store to buy Duncan Hines marble cake mix.  I felt like a TOTAL failure, but whatever.  It’s been a bad week.  My 18 month old son fell on the empty dishwasher rack while I was in the middle of making cookies for another customer, and lacerated his eyelid.  Spent the night in the ER making sure he didn’t puncture his eyeball or any other dangerous head trauma.  I was in a panic all week—the accident set me back a day and a half, and I spent the next 48 hours baking non-stop with no sleep for 2 other cakes to catch up.  Delivered them both yesterday on time, thankfully.

Next week I have 3 cakes due for Thanksgiving and I have a headache just thinking about it… it’s already Sunday!  I gotta get crackin’ tonight i suppose. 

Thanks for your help guys, I’ll be looking into those suggestions!

Well Douxhouse, I hope your son (and you) are over the ordeal.  It is good you delivered your cakes on time.  It is tough baking sometimes, you have to love it!!