Pinterest Fail- "Hot Mess" Chocolate Raspberry Cake 🎂

What do you do when you have taken the time to:

• Found an amazing Pinterest recipe that looks incredible and you want to recreate it.

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• Gone to grocery store and purchased ingredients for said recipe.

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• Improvised recipe, because hey- you can make it a lot easier than the recipe.

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• If recipe is a cake, baked that cake to PERFECTION* (said in "Great British Bake-Off Host" voice).

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• Thought you had let the cakes cool off enough to frost.

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And then friends, you realize you didn't let it cool quite long enough, and EVERYTHING FALLS APART!

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Now, I am by no means a "professional baker", but I am competent enough to know better- you ALWAYS have to let the cake cool for at least an hr (preferably longer, and ESPECIALLY on a hot July day), but in this instance, we had family coming that evening, and I wanted to get the crumb coat done and pop the cake in the fridge to chill before we went to church. SUCH A FAIL!! I had wanted to take pretty pictures, post my recipe success on the blog, have my family rave about the cake that night, and it just DID NOT happen.

My intentions were pure, and I took pictures of baking journey (see below).

1.  I had the best ingredients:

   2. I used by KitchenAid aka my BFF to whip that cake mix into shape:

3. I baked 3 beautiful 9 inch cakes to perfection, worked on the fillings while I thought they were cooling, and then proceeded to assemble them WAY too early. They were cool to the touch, but I should have waited at least an hr longer or chilled them first bc the fillings were so soft.

    4. After I had assembled all the layers and crumb-coated the whole thing, it FELL APART!!! 😭😭😭. 

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I may have cried a little bit. It was too warm, and the filling was too soft, and it died. I couldn't even take a picture of it because I was so upset. But I needed this cake to celebrate two family members' birthdays at family dinner Sunday night, so I had to rally and come up with a new plan.

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1. I decided to invent a new dessert- a "Hot Mess, Chocolate Raspberry Cake" 🎂. This dessert would have the layers of a cake, but each layer would be a frozen "mash-up" of the cake and the fillings. It was the only way I could see that I could resurrect the cake, use all of my ingredients, and still have a birthday cake that we could have people blow off candles on it.

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2. So, I mashed up all of my broken down cake into a bowl (cake, raspberry jam, and mascarpone filling, and frosting all in one).

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 3. I put parchment paper down in the bottom of each cake pan (so that the mashed up cake wouldn't stick to it), and divided up the mixture equally into the three cake pans from my previous bake.

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4. I then froze the layers in the freezer for 4 hrs (that seems like a long time, but with how "gooey" everything was, I needed that much time in order for the layers to chill enough to where I could reassemble them).

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 5. I then prayed to the heavens that my plan would work , took the cake layers out of the freezer, and began to assemble them, all over again, with fresh chocolate cream cheese frosting, and fresh raspberry jam (still pre-bought from the store):

Yes, the layers look A MESS, but trust me- worth the end result!

  6. I gave the "new" cake a crumb coat, and stuck it back in the freezer for an hr.

  7. Then I took it out of the freezer, added another layer of frosting, and decorated with piped frosting and fresh raspberries.

  8. And then I refroze the entire cake for 2 more hours and took it out right as we got ready to sing "Happy Birthday" and it was AWESOME! Not at all hard, not all stiff and frozen (only the raspberries on top were a little more frozen than the rest). 

It tasted like those raspberry, chocolate stick candies they make at Christmas time, mixed with a brownie cake pop. It was awesome and EVERYONE loved it!

Here is my recipe (enjoy!):