Last night we were invited to go over to a friend’s for dinner. My contribution was bread, and dessert. My daughter and I love to bake and we do it often – we get a lot of use out of the KitchenAid mixer. She chose to make a buttermilk chocolate cake so we tried out a new recipe. The batter was delicious and I was really confident it was going to be delicious. And it was. The only problem was that it wouldn’t come out of the pans in one piece. We were planning on making a layer cake but both cakes just fell apart into little pieces. This was at 3:30 and we were supposed to be there around 5 or 5:30. Now, it’s not like our friends would refuse us dinner if we didn’t bring dessert but we were kind of bummed out that it was a mess.
So . . . I started thinking . . . well, what can one do with crumbled up cake?
We made trifle. If you’ve never had trifle, it’s layers of cake, whipped cream and fruit most of the time. We made ours out of crumbled chocolate cake, chocolate pudding, homemade whipped cream and chopped up chocolate chips all in a big crystal bowl so you could see all of the layers. Yummo as Rachael Ray would say. The recovery from the disaster was actually better than the original cake probably would have been.
My point of this story is that even if something doesn’t turn out the way you originally planned, very often, you can recover gracefully with some creative thinking and come up with something even better than the original. Things can morph over time into options or concepts you may not have realized were really a great idea, and things that collapse on you can sometimes be all for the best. Go figure. When a plan falls apart, or a project doesn’t turn out right – sometimes the right thing to do is walk away, but sometimes taking another look and thinking “outside the box” can turn into something spectacular. Take a chance and see what happens!
