The Orange Cake Debacle

First I'd like to thank Marcy and Ginny for your kind comments. Thank You! Now about that orange cake recipe. I should have known better. I've done it before with disastrous results. I am not by any means a gambler of any kind. But I did anyway. I experimented with a new recipe on a crowd of people. Silly me what the heck was I thinking?
I should have known that a recipe that calls for the rinds and juice of three oranges was going to be a gamble for me. I DO NOT like making anything without exact measurements. A little of this and a handful of that has never worked well for me. I had red flags going up in my head but apparently I was color blind yesterday!
I followed the recipe exactly. Well as exactly as I could when it didn't state how much orange juice to use for each section. After all, in my defense, each orange has a different amount of juice in it. We're talking about mother nature here people! The two layered cake came out of the oven looking great. At that point I still had high hopes. Next came the filling. Whipped cream, coconut, powdered sugar,orange peel rinds and orange juice. Sounds good. Looked scary. To thin. Added a little more powdered sugar.Getting to sweet. Put in fridge for awhile,maybe it will thicken in there.
Meanwhile after greasing and flouring cake pans a hundred times before, this cake is not coming out of the pans. In walks "Mighty Mouse". Remember "Here I Come To Save The Day"? My husband was able to get them out but not without cracking one. By now I'm thinking "I know I have some xanax around here somewhere." I just went for it .I put the filling between the layers. Looked awful! Made the frosting,again with the orange juice. Poured it over the cake according to the directions. This cake looks so pitiful, I almost feel sorry for it. Is it normal to feel sorry for an inanimate object? Mighty Mouse enters again to stick toothpicks in the cracked side to keep it from sliding off the rest of the cake. I am laughing now. This is starting to become funny. Quickly we put it in the fridge.
Now I am two hours away from Lenten dinner and only have one dessert. This will not fly in a Lutheran church. What will I do? I still need to bathe and beautify myself. In walks Mighty Mouse once again to save the day. He asks "Do we have any cocoa?". I could not remember because that's how much I love baking . It turned out that we did and my sweet husband being sick and on his birthday made from scratch a delicious and pretty chocolate cake with homemade chocolate frosting. How cool is that? The dinner and desserts were a big success. A good time was had by all.
The orange cake? Well as it turned out, as ugly as it was, it really was delicious. We kept it at home and it will not go to waste.