Read TWICE, cook once....

Do you ever have one of those days where you have trouble focusing?  You have great plans to get stuff done; nothing seems to go as you planned.  I had one of those days yesterday!

I'm making the cake for my brother-in-law's wedding in April and they've requested some things I've never made before, one of them being German chocolate filling.  My plan was to make a batch of German chocolate filling....you know, the stuff with the pecans and coconut....and put it on some chocolate cupcakes for my husband to take into work. That didn't quite work out.

I went online to Cake Central, printed up a recipe, read through it and got to work.  I got out all the ingredients, mixed the butter, sugar, evaporated milk and egg yolks on the stove until the butter had all melted, then I dumped in the coconut, pecans and vanilla.

Then I mixed it all together.

It looked a little gross, but I don't see how that mixture wouldn't look gross!  :)

The recipe said to let it cool until it was spreadable, so I let it set on the counter for a couple hours.  I kept checking it and it wasn't getting any thicker, so I transferred it to a bowl and stuck it in the fridge.  It sat there for a few more hours and still wasn't much thicker.  It was sort of like a sugary coconut-pecan soup!

I'm pretty sure that's not considered "spreadable", nor would it be a good filling for a tiered cake!  I thought I might be able to get away with getting rid of some of the liquid and putting the thicker part on top of the cupcakes. 

It didn't exactly work; they turned into ooey, gooey, sticky messes!  I still couldn't figure out what went wrong, so while I sent my husband to the trash can with these beauties, I looked over the recipe again.  It was then I realized that I'd done wrong.....

The recipe said to heat the butter, sugar, evaporated milk, and egg yolks over a low heat until THICKENED....somehow I missed that very important part.  In my head, I'd read to heat it until thin, so right after the butter melted I took it off the heat and mixed in the other ingredients.  This stuff never stood a chance of becoming spreadable!!!!  On the bright side, I came to the conclusion that I did, indeed, have the right ingredients and a good recipe, it was just bad execution.

The moral of this story:  ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS read the recipe thoroughly BEFORE starting the cooking process!

Stay tuned for my next post: German Chocolate Take II