My very own cake wreck

I like baking. Usually. This time was not so fun.

Molly's bridal shower is coming up and I wanted to make a nice cake. I decided to do a trial run this weekend. Good thing...

Not so pretty, huh?

I pulled this recipe from Epicurious. It's supposed to be a lemon-raspberry cake. The actual cake itself tastes pretty great. It's very light, sponge-y and has a great lemon taste without being over powering. But that's about where the good stuff ends. I don't know if I'm just not used to our new oven or if it just sucks (which is highly probable), but some how it ended up being perfectly baked inside with a layer of burnt all the way around. No problem, I'll just saw that off with a knife.

Then I was supposed to put this raspberry syrup stuff between the layers. But the recipe calls for liquor, so I made some substitutions. I'm not sure it's supposed to be as runny as it turned out.. I felt like it just drenched the cake and made it a little too soggy. Nice flavor, though.

But then the cake started crumbling when I tried to layer and frost it. And the buttercream wouldn't stick to the syrup-y cake. That's supposed to be plain, vanilla buttercream. The pink and the seeds are the syrup bleeding through.

So while it tastes pretty delicious, it's a horrible eye-sore and I'm not hunting for another recipe to try. I fear there may be many test runs in my future.