If you’ve been following I Wanna Bake’s Facebook page, you already know that this week’s bakeventure didn’t go so well.  It was supposed to be chocolate raspberry upside down cake, but it turned out to be half-baked chocolate raspberry sludge.  Don’t get me wrong, the cooked parts were delicious.  But this was so ugly I didn’t even have the heart to try to fix it.  I mean really, look at this:

Lesson learned: flipping upside down cakes is not as easy as you might think.

I’m not going to go through the recipe here because I am confident that I can revise and improve it.  I used this chocolate cake recipe and got some inspiration from this blog post about turning any fruit into an upside down cake.  The cake itself turned out quite tasty (I had some leftover batter that I made into a mini layer cake for another upcoming post).  Of course I had to go and try to make these small and put together a bunch of different recipes because that’s just what I do.  I should have learned my lesson with the ill-fated first incarnation of my chocolate bear claws.

I suspect the high moisture content of the raspberries may have been part of the problem, and clearly the brown sugar never quite caramelized.  To make matters worse, this chocolate cake rises A LOT.

See? Kid n’ Play hair on a cake.

Next time, I might leave out the butter/brown sugar mixture entirely.  I may even admit defeat and leave the raspberries out of the cake, as I’m not sure that they will ever end up cooking correctly.  Instead, they could be turned into a raspberry chocolate sauce, or some kind of filling.  Alternatively, they might go into the cake batter.  Clearly, this warrants more research.

Have you ever baked something so bad that you didn’t want anyone to ever see it?  Share your dirty baking secrets in the comments below!  I promise I won’t judge. 😉