Sweet tears

This comes a little late, but here is a cake I made in February for the boyfriend's mother's birthday. I had only a few days of warning; it was to be made for a Friday evening and both my Wednesdays and Thursday evenings were rather full. I picked the recipe on Wednesday based on the fact that it could be done during one afternoon. This is a cake made with 6 rings of meringue acting as 6 layers, which are filled with chocolate whipped cream and strawberry whipped cream, the whole covered thing by lovely puffs of vanilla whipped cream. It looked nice and easy enough despite its 3 stars rating (I've made cakes with similar ratings before, but they tend to take 2 days).

So, I picked up my ingredients on Wednesdays, I made the meringue rings on Thursdays and I pulled up my sleeves on Friday afternoon  after getting home from work. It started well... until the first ring broke while trying to paint it with chocolate. Ok, no big deal right? By the way, painting brittle meringue is not an easy task. I choose the wrong kind of brush, very likely, so it did not help. Anyway, I patched it somehow while using melted chocolate as glue, but I managed to break the second too... crap. The concept is to staple them on top of each others, THEN when the rings are later filled with the creams, you rotate it and they should hold it all while standing. That's where the 3 stars rating come, me think, because it just would have collapsed into an horrid mess. My cake at least. Here is a lovely picture that almost brought me to tears as I tried not to panic, with 2 hours left  before the birthday dinner. (The picture below shows them laying. Imagine rotating that... Instant mess!)

I don't think the rings can be called that at this point. They are mostly a gathering of meringue segments more of less arranged into a circular fashion with some strange cross in the middle. What to do with that mess? Start a new cake? Out of butter and one egg left, I won't go far with that. Hmm... I could cover up the mess with the whipped vanilla cream and hope for the best.

That sort of worked. It is rather plain for look but no one can tell the disaster it is hiding! Luckily, it was also a very delicious cake so the taste went down in history, while its appearance was quickly forgotten.