I tried to make a cake for your birthday, but...

Ok. I am not a cook, but I like food and I kind of like cooking if there's a lot of batter to eat and when there's no pressure. However, last Sunday was Cortney's birthday and my name was picked to make something or buy something to bring to work on Friday. This felt slightly pressure-y. Normal people might not feel the inner, inner city, inner city pressure (it's just a cake, I mean come on), but I am not normal. As Friday got closer I became slightly more panicky, and started poring through recipes for the perfect dessert. Fortunately Oliver's birthday was Thursday, so I made some fudge on Tuesday and then baby food bars for Thursday to practice for my cake. This was probably inconvenient for Nancy and Matt's new healthy diet, but I had to pawn off some of the dessert on them. It did get a little out of control for a few days there. I decided I should bake a cake, since it was a birthday after all. Who cares if I had never made one before, right? Immediately I realized that this endeavor might be slightly out of my league, since I am not really in any sort of ballpark when it comes to cooking. And especially cakes. Cortney likes lemon, so I chose a white layer cake with lemon filling (just for in between the layers, not like a filled pie or something), and plain frosting that I would somehow figure out how to make lemony later. Apparently it's never a good idea to start making something if you don't know how all of it is going to work. First of all, I don't read cookbook language well. For example I looked up lemon zest on the internet. That didn't really make sense, so I looked up how to make it. Then I looked up what kind of utensil to use (it turns out that vegetable peelers are not the best kind for zesting. Neither are cheese graters, counter-intuitively. I tried both.). Then I looked up what size to cut what was peeled. Or zested? None of the things I looked up really gave me a straight answer, because of course it's in chef language which I don't get. Anyway.
First of course I needed cake pans. I wanted to make a perfectly round little tower of cake (HA! My poor, simple-minded last week self). So I bought three cake pans (somewhat of an impulsive purchase, but hey. There is a distinct possibility I will have to make a cake in the future. But hopefully not soon). The recipe said to use either three 8"x2" pans OR three 9"x2" pans. This seemed a little generous for a cake recipe, since I thought it was all supposed to be very specific measurements. I wanted my cake to be tall because Cortney is tall and I just wanted it to be tall instead of round and flat, but there are no 8"x2" pans in Eugene, so I got the other size. Then I got all the ingredients, including cream of tartar which I have never heard of. Strangely it is shelved with the spices. I forgot lemon juice so I went back to the store. (Keep in mind this prep work was done like two days in advance because on Thursday night I had class from 8 a.m. until 2 and I had to stay longer in my lab and didn't get out until 6:30 and I had no idea how long it takes to make cake. It also takes longer if you don't know what any of the recipe means).
After having mild anxiety attacks throughout much of Thursday anytime I thought about the cake (I often thought about the cake. I like sugar and I just bought lots of sugary ingredients that would somehow even if I wasn't sure how yet, make a cake), I finally got home and started following the recipe precisely. Or as precisely as someone can in a second language. The first half was easy (theoretically). Combine things like sugar and flour and butter with a mixer. Then the mixer broke. Of course, it was $7.99, but I bought it TWO DAYS before for the baby food bars practice round. Sheesh. Back to Fred Meyer for the exact same mixer, which I figured was kind of stupid since my chances were still the same for getting a mixer that would break, but I was desperate. And not about to drop $50 on a mixer that I probably don't deserve to own since I can't read cookbooks. Then I picked up Adam from practice and thankfully he knew what "when the egg whites form soft peaks" meant. I still managed to waste 8 eggs on that though. I'm not really sure how, but it happened. Fortunately I was paranoid while shopping and bought two dozen eggs instead of one (thank you, fear. Thank you). Finally I had both a flour/sugar/other things mixture and an egg white/cream of tarter mixture and I needed to "fold" the egg whites into the other mixture. I guessed how to fold it and tried that a few times and then ended up just stirring it until it looked mixed. While I did that (multi-tasking is often called for in cookbooks, to my chagrin. What I mean by "while I did that" is "before I did that"), I preheated the oven and greased and floured (happily there was a description of this on another page in the cookbook. Who knew?) the three pans. I divided the whole mixture between the pans and put them in the oven. For 25 minutes I looked at the clock every two minutes. Then I took out the little cake parts and stuck forks in them to see if anything stuck to the fork. Luckily nothing did, because I probably would not know what to do if it did. No thanks to the cookbook, which had nothing about defending against things sticking to the fork. I dumped each cake out of its pan onto a plate. Of course they were not quite the perfect shape, but I figured I'd deal with that later after the filling was done. The filling went glitch-free shockingly, probably since I had googled lemon zest on the internet the day before. I put the filling in between the layers and then had a very strangely shaped cake. I cut off (with a knife, it toppled and slid a lot and was fairly terrifying) about an inch around the circumference of the cake. It wasn't even, but it looked better than before.
Frosting time. Remember my lack of foresight about the frosting? Yes, this did end up mattering. I had no powdered sugar left after the baby food bars, so I went with a recipe that I had ingredients for. Boiled white icing requires a candy thermometer. They should really list the materials needed up there with the ingredients at the beginning of recipes. Like a science project. You know, hypothesis (Cake success?), materials, procedure, results, conclusions. Works cited. Well, shocking, I didn't have a candy thermometer. No problem, my already slow - and now fueled by sugary batter - cooking brain thought. I'll just estimate when 230 degrees is and it'll probably work...nope, not really. I know boiling is 120 degrees. But beyond that there is really no reference point. Long story short: The frosting died. It looked bubbly and was definitely goopy and weird. I put it on the cake anyway, just on principle and set it in its new cake carrier to see if it would survive the night. In the morning I threw the cake in the garbage, and then (my future planning skills are clearly non-existent) wanted to see what it would taste like. So yes, I ate cake out of the garbage can with a fork like a crackhead. It tasted good - I carved in past the frosting. So at 7:23 a.m. I bought a cake at Sweet Life with beautiful frosting called Chocolate Orgasm. And it was perfectly round! But mine was taller.