Oh, believe me, it is SO simple to make an ugly cake! (and that’s not even the ugliest I made in my life… There was once an accident with ganache, and mini meringues and a chocolate cake risen in the wrong way… But it was many years ago, before the blog, before catering… My friends still remember that mud mess…)

First of all, you need three major factors:
– Waking up with a bad mood: we are not machines or a starred chef (not even an “unstarred” one in my case!), and a bad mood can influence a lot our “cooking skills”… At least tell me it is like this for everybody!!!
– Make the wrong pastry the last time you had a bad mood (and you do not remember how much flour you put, but sure too much for the amount of butter you used) and freeze it…
– Defrost the wrong pastry during the day with a bad mood, knowing you have a bad mood, but keeping forgetting about it…

Once you have established all those three requirements for disaster, be sure to have enough marmalade to overload your cake. And be sure that that day you absolutely want to play “the good pâtissier” game and try to established the perfect crostata (jam tart) with an innovative technique that nobody, not even Pierre Hermé, thought about.

Yesterday I was all this at once, something that happens maybe once in a lifetime, and so why not use all this hidden potential of mine and make sure to come up with a disaster???
What am I, a fool???

My original idea was a two layer cake. The layers made with sweet shortcrust pastry, and the filling with homemade jam (I have too many!).
So, why nobody in the pâtisserie world EVER came up with such an idea??? Well, maybe because it is a BAD idea, and even worst if you have the WRONG pastry!!!

My pastry was everything but not compact. To roll it for the base I had to put it on a piece of greaseproof paper, to be sure not to destroy it while transferring it in to the mould. As I had lots of leftovers form the base I decided to make a second layer. So I putted a jar of orange marmalade on the base, and my intention was to put a layer of pastry over it and then a layer of lemon and grapefruit marmalade.
First problem: my pastry, as you should have understood by now, was WRONG, so it kept crumbling and crumbling. So I thought what a nice idea it was to have a layer of crumbled pastry!!! And so I did.
Second problem: unlike the orange one, lemon and grapefruit marmalade was extremely thick, so absolutely impossible to spread over the crumbled pastry without mixing it all together.
But I am stubborn, very stubborn, so I kept going on, hoping that everything would settle in the oven…

I couldn’t be more wrong…

At the end, the finished product was really ugly, but it does taste good… Maybe too much marmalade for my taste, but my French husband (from now on The French) liked it…
And as I am slower writing my blog in English, and at the moment I do not have so many posts to publish for hard and busy times, I couldn’t let such a disaster be wasted…