7-18-22
Today I got up and decided to make my chocolate stout cake. This recipe requires mucho expensive ingredients and about four hours to make. Since it was raining all day, I told Pug that I thought today would be a good day for us to bake a cake.
Things started out ok, chocolate, stout and butter melted down and eggs and sour cream mixed. Then comes the dry ingredients. Four cups of flour needed. Well, I can use all-purpose or maybe the cake flour I just bought at the Amish Farm store down the road. Surely, the "local" cake flour would be better than grocery store flour - no? Well then, cake flour it is!
Gee, the batter looked a little airy. No matter, into the oven the cake goes while Pug battles with the buttercream filling. Now, Pug and I, in the history of our lives, have NEVER been able to make a buttercream filling or frosting, but yet we continue making disgusting concoctions thinking maybe someday we'll get it right. Today was not the day.
Pug mixes the butter with the sugar and adds a little Tullamore Whiskey instead of vanilla for taste, to go with the stout. Pug wants more whiskey since she can't taste it, but I say don't do it since it may overwhelm the filling. I should have relented and added a half cup of whiskey, just to help take the edge of the disaster that was to come.
Out of the oven comes the cake. Ok, I forgot to peel off the parchment paper from the bottom when I took them out of the pans. So, I turn them over and as I start to peel the paper away, the cake starts falling apart. What the blazes! Ok, ok. Maybe when the layers cool it will be fine and I can patch them together with that wonderful buttercream filling Pug made.
On to the chocolate ganache frosting. That should be easy, peasy, just cream and chocolate, and lo and behold it was. The cake is now ready for its assembly. Oops, the bottom layer is still falling apart. Oh well, here comes the buttercream filling to cement it all together. I plop the filling on top and the next layer of cake, which is also falling apart. Whoa nelly! The cake is disintegrating, sliding off, and the butter cream is separating into a buttery, gooey mess.
Lovely.
I'm just about to dump it all in the trash, when Pug swoops in and rescues the heap of disgusting, drooping mess. She plops the last cake layer on top of the disintegrating buttercream and throws it into the fridge to solidify - hopefully. I'm off doing the ten thousand dishes, thinking maybe, just maybe the delectable ganache can cover all the mess. So I let the ganache set just enough to pour over the top of the cake sludge.
Here it is:
Ok Napoleon and Pug, but what does China have to do with your disgusting cake? You just can't bake, you xenophobic jerks, and are looking to blame the poor Chinese. Probably, and yes we’re pissed at the whole disaster this morning. Yet... I know the problem with that cake was the flour. Flour bought from the Amish, who probably bought it from China.
You see, everything China makes is crap, and America is crap because it keeps buying components/staples and everything else from China. I'm sick of all this outsourcing. I'm sick of China and I'm sick of the US and its "cheapest landed cost" garbage. Gee, EVERYONE is shocked, shocked I tell you that some ingredients for the "me-too common cold freakout shots®" are from China. Plus all the needles are from China. Really? I can't imagine why the shots don't work and are poisonous to boot. s/ The Chinese quality control is the bestest in all the world, and they never cut corners for us gringos! /s
EVERYTHING now comes from China. All our food, electronics, steel, plastic, cardboard, paint, drugs, weapons, seeds, etc, etc, etc. China is the saviour of the world and we would all die immediately if China couldn't manufacture EVERYTHING. So what we have now is no US economy, a country black-mailed and held hostage by the CCP, and a citizenry poisoned and living with everything broken and just utterly crap.
Fifty F'ing years of this insanity and no end in sight. I can research and try to find made in the USA stuff, or at least not made in China stuff, but in the end NEARLY ALL THE COMPONENTS/STAPLES of all the stuff are made in China. Good times!
China F'ed our cake. I know it. Will I still eat it? Probably. But I'm never going to make it again. Instead I'll go to Walmart and buy a Chinese ingredient cake, with its Chinese pre-processed butter filling, all wrapped up nicely in its Chinese plastic container with its Chinese printed label for $9.99. If I have to deal with outsourced crap for the rest of my life, it's going to be easy and cheaper crap with no extra work or cost on my part. Because as Donna Summer so eloquently sang:
Someone left my cake out in the rain I don’t think that I can take it Cause it took so long to bake it And I’ll never have that recipe again Oh No....
Exactly.
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F#@% China