Kitchen Fail

Remember that *hopefully successful* endeavor I mentioned a few days ago? The bunny cake? Total fail.

When I was growing up my mom would bake a bunny cake for Easter or birthday parties to add a little pizazz to a traditional double layer round cake. The idea is that you bake two 9" rounds and use one as the face of the bunny. The other round is cut like a baseball (two arc-like cuts starting near the outer edge, cutting in close to the middle, then arcing out again) to create the ears, leaving the leftover middle part for your bunny's respectable bow tie. Frost, decorate with jelly beans and licorice for the whiskers, and you've got yourself a festive little treat.

Well. I bought a cake mix at Trader Joe's and a mix-it-yourself frosting (something I thought I'd try), donned my Anthropologie apron and gave this whole thing a whirl. I was afraid that Chris and I would probably be responsible for consuming the entire cake, so I made the I-should-have-known-it-would-be-fatal decision to go with cupcakes. Baby bunnies. I'd follow the same directions but craft these Easter cottontails into manageable, sharable cupcakes. I greased my pans with butter, lightly floured them per the advice of the directions, mixed the mix and popped them in the oven.

The aroma of chocolate permeated the house. I watched the cupcakes rise (and continue to rise....rise right into chubby bunnies) until the timer went off. Everything was going so well until those buggers refused to come out of the pan. I tried right away, I tried after letting them cool a bit. After many creative attempts I just had to scrape them out with a spoon, all crumbled and bottomless since half of the cake decided to stay put.

I managed to get a few out of their molds and to make the cuts for the ears and bowtie. Chris said my cake creation looked like Stitch. I didn't even bother mixing the frosting. Poor little chubby bunnies.

Official post-Easter decision: I'm making brownies next year.