Unlike a lot of women, I can admit it. Cooking any sort of food is not my strength. The good chef gene must of skipped me considering I come from a family of great cooks, on both my mum and dads side. So what the hell happened to me?!

Although I’m not really that good in the kitchen I’m still going to attempt something that will more than likely end up on Pinterest as an ultimate Fail…….I’m going to bake and decorate my baby girls second birthday cake!

Now while I was trying to figure out exactly what I wanted to make for her I took a look on Pinterest for idea on what to make her that wasn’t too hard that it would be a guaranteed failure and I didn’t want something so easy that it looked like a small child made it up. As I looked Pinterest it dawned upon me to make her a Finding Dory themed cake but not like one of the complicated ones I saw posted up and I remembered my favourite birthday cake as a kid was from the 1980’s Womens Weekly Birthday Cake Cookbook, The Swimming Pool Cake . This was the cake I could make but change it up to suit in with the Dory theme. I could look like a baker off the GREAT AUSTRALIAN BAKE OFF and be a shit cook.

So I dug up a copy of the old cookbook, the recipe looked fairly simple. YES!! I don’t have to cook the cake from scratch just use a packet mix (surely I can’t fuck that up) and a shit load of lollies and jelly.

Well….setting up the cake pans was a bit of a struggle. Years ago my mum had bought me a some cake pans as well as other baking equipment for Christmas (she mustn’t know me very well) and I never really took them out of the box. So this was the perfect opportunity to use them. They had removable bottoms to help get the cake out easier but they weren’t attached so I had to figure out WHAT FUCKING END THE BOTTOM WENT ON! Seriously it’s sounds like I’m a absolute dumbass but the bloody tray looked the same at both ends and I didn’t want cake leaking all over my oven. After an examination of the box I correctly attached the bottom of the tray and from there it was smooth sailing. Greening up the tray making the batter (without eating half of it) and putting it in the oven and timed it exactly to what the box said. Once I got it out of the oven….that’s when I realised it went south. The cake looked like it had been starving itself for weeks…it was too skinny! Nothing like the photo on the box.

Shit! I have to fix this. So luckily I had a back up cake box packet so I could make up a new cake and just serve the other one as and extra.  Same as before made it up no problems, double checked the pan wasn’t too big just in case that was my mistake before. Nope.  Put it in the oven and like before a skinny cake emerges.

What the hell?!!!

I got so defeated not once but twice the cakes came out too skinny and almost brownies. So I did the only thing you could do….drive to the supermarket buy two cheap cakes, cut the icing off and make flat, pile on top of each other and decorate.

The decorations was the easy part. I can make an awesome buttercream icing but that’s as far as I go in baking.