Well, that's a bummer.

Yesterday, I did some talking about my wife's birthday, and in the post, I included a picture of her birthday cake, which was pretty enough, I'll just go ahead and post again, instead of linking to it.

Very pleased with the look and design of the cake.  Like I said earlier, we had won it in a silent auction at a fund-raiser.  My wife knows the lady that makes them, and convinced me to make a pretty secure bid for it.  The finished product was exactly what my wife had pictured when she described the cake to Melissa.  Melissa took it as a challenge, and enjoyed making something different than 'another darn wedding cake'.  If she had a website that I knew of, I would certainly recommend her to anyone in the Tri-Cities looking for a pretty cake.

However, in my world, a cake is not just for looking at.  Taste wise, this cake nailed two of the three components that go into making a tasty cake...the yellow cake inside was good, moist, and actually had flavor.  In my experience, as a chocolate on chocolate guy, I am left wanting for taste in a yello cake, but the cake part of this cake was good.

Likewise, the two different layers of cream in the cake, one vanilla and the other banana/lemon were great.

The ONLY problem with this cake was the fondant.  What a disappointment.  I don't think any of the blame for this goes to Melissa...I believe she buys her fondant...but as someone who REALLY likes the overly sweet, too damn rich frosting that Costco puts on their cakes...I couldn't handle to fondant.  Wrong feel, wrong taste...just wrong.  It might not have been bad....but it didn't mean my flavor expectations.  I actually picked mine off, thinking it distracted from the quality of the cake/filling.

If we give looks 50% of the vote, and then split the taste equally, this cake would score an 83/84 out of 100.  Even replacing with the fondant with something out of a plastic container, like Duncan Hines or Betty Crocker frosting would have made it a 99 out of 100(-1 point for white cake instead of chocolate.)  Yes...I know there is NO way the cake would have looked even half as nice with real frosting, but I'm a guy...taste is just as more important to me than it looking pretty. 

That's just my opinion though.  My wife, and the women playing Bunco, all loved it...I know my wife gave out Melissa's info several times.  From that viewpoint, it was 100% success.

I did notice I wasn't the only one scraping sheets of fondant into the trash though.