A couple of years ago I decides to bake a cake for the first time. Although I was an expert bread maker, I had never actually made a cake. I got the idea on Christmas Eve. We had about six people stopping by and I wanted to bake something special. So, I found this recipe for a German Chocolate Cake.



Since I live in good sized city with a Wal-Mart Super Center and Costcos within five minutes of my house, I knew that any ingredient needed could be easily found. But for this recipe, I decided to try the local market.

When I make a recipe for the first time, I usually follow the directions to the letter. The next time I'll get even more creative. As my luck would have it, the local store did not have the two main ingredients I needed. I knew they would have been easily found at the mega superstores, but I didn't want to fight traffic getting there. I just chose two different kinds of chocolate.

As soon as I put the cake in the oven some friends stopped by to chat. As luck would have it, I got caught up in the conversations and left the cake in a little too long. We were at very high altitude, surrounded by snow-capped volcanoes in the city of Puebla, Mexico. The oven had seen better days; the temperature inside was probably not as hot as the thermostat indicated. Due to the combination of these factors, the cake needed to stay in the oven longer than the recipe recommended.

The milk chocolate I used was too runny. The icing kept falling off of the cake. It tasted great, but it slid off the sides of the cake faster than I could spread it on again. I was running late, asking myself out loud why I had to do this today, of all days. In any second, I was expecting to hear the door bell ring. As a last resort, I shoved the cake in the freezer in the hope that the icing would stay in one place.

When I took the cake out of the freezer, it was perfect. It was better than I could have ever imagined. No one will forget that special evening. I am always asked to make that cake again, but I haven't done it yet. It would be tough to pull it off again. As long as I leave it that way, none of us will ever forget the German Chocolate Cake that almost wasn't.