XXL Oreo: Round 1

I was snacking on a couple of these, contemplating my next blog entry when it donned on me. I wanted to make an extra extra large Oreo - in cake form. I was given a set of cake pans for Christmas a couple years ago that I had yet to try out, so i thought this would be a good opportunity to do so. They are round pans with frilled edges like an Oreo. The top pan has grooves in the bottom of it that are meant to resemble the top of the cookie. I assumed this would be a fun and fairly easy project. Here is the story of one of my more embarrassing outcomes...

I was pretty much doomed from the beginning when choosing my ingredients. Like other times when I am feeling vivacious, tonight was a different story. After sitting through a graduation ceremony in a torrential downpour, I wanted to take the quickest and easiest route possible. My normally unsophisticated pantry was fully stocked with everything I needed - Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, water, oil, eggs and even cool whip in the freezer. I got out my pans and went right to work. I read somewhere once that while making chocolate cake its a good idea to grease the pan and dust it with cocoa powder rather than flour in order to omit any white residue. Since the top of the cake wasn't going to be frosted with anything, I thought this was probably a good idea. In retrospect, I'm not so sure if this was good advice or not...but I'll get there. I mixed up the batter and poured it into each of the pans and stuck them in the oven for a half hour. When they were done, I cooled them in the pans for about 10 minutes before transferring them to a cooling rack. This is where most of the cake went wrong. I started with the bottom half first, which ended up breaking in half upon removing it from the pan. Maybe I should have let it cool longer first? But the box said 10 minutes was enough! I figured it wouldn't matter much anyway since it would be the bottom of the cake. I started taking the top cake out of its pan and I had a full on disaster on my hands. The cake stuck in the grooves on the bottom of the pan that were meant to resemble the top of the cookie so I was left with a ripped up, divot-ed surface that was supposed to be the top of the cake. Thinking that it couldn't get any worse than it already was, I decided to flip the top half over and use the other side as the top. It wasn't pretty either but at least it didn't have a chunk an inch deep taken out of it. In the process of flipping it, the cake crumbled into about 6 pieces in my hands. At this point I thought I should probably just keep this mishap to myself rather than posting it for everyone to read, but then I wouldn't be holding to my original promise of documentation of trials and tribulations. I emptied a container of cool whip between layers and pieced the cake together as best I could. Here is how it turned out...

Obviously not the prettiest cake in the world, and it barely even looks like an Oreo. Not even the off-brand kind. Believe it or not, this picture actually makes it look better than it did in real life. You also can't see the entire other side which is in shambles. Oreo Cake - 1, Suzannah - 0. You can bet I'm going to take another crack at this one...