Dr. Strangeoven (or, how I learned to stop stressing and serve crooked cakes)…

I just baked a cake so ugly that I will never think of a “Yo’ Mama” joke ever again.

No, really. This thing is UGLY. I should have real­ized the endeavor was doomed when it was OOZING CHOCOLATE LAVA from one side of the pan while it baked, but I was lulled into a false sense of secu­rity by the smell of its choco­latey good­ness waft­ing through­out the kitchen.  (Chocolate-cake-aroma-lulling, next on Ger­aldo.)  I mean, the recipe (Amanda Hesser’s Choco­late Dump-it Cake, from Cook­ing for Mr. Latte and the new New York Times Cook­book) said it might leak– but it didn’t say there’d be half the cake left on the drip pan when it was done.

Deli­cious half a cake lava spill, but still. HALF A CAKE. (Okay, maybe only a few table­spoons. But still. IT WAS A LOT at the time that I looked into the oven five min­utes before the cake was sup­posed to be done and did the Homer Simp­son Gasp of Hor­ror because of the impend­ing Great Choco­late Cake Flood of 2012 going on just behind the glass and steel door.) Thank good­ness the bits of the fos­silized lava are insanely moist and don’t even need frost­ing. Though a sprin­kle of pow­dered sugar? That would be awesome.

Okay, okay. It can’t be that bad, you say.

Wanna bet?

I’d say it’s the Derpy Hooves of choco­late cakes, but that would be pay­ing this ugly thing too much of a com­pli­ment. Also, Derpy Hooves totally rocks.

I’m not going to blame it on the recipe, though, because did I men­tion the fos­silized bits are deli­cious? I will blame it on my Dad’s weird-ass oven, because the gas heat fluc­tu­ates, hand-to-God, though not so badly that I’ve called the plumber despite how badly all my bak­ing comes out since I’ve moved in. Either that, or, well…

Nah. It has noth­ing to do with the circa 1920’s Alzheimer’s alu­minum pan that I baked the thing in rather than spend two hours look­ing for my per­fectly use­ful, per­fectly awe­some sil­i­cone tube pan out of one of my 90 boxes in the base­ment. (The boxes are labeled. I swear. There are just a lot of them.)

Why on earth would a crooked pan make a crooked, lava-drooling cake? YOU SO CRAZY, YOU LOGICAL INTERNET, YOU.

Yeah. Next time, I’ll go pan-spelunking down­stairs. That doesn’t mean I’m not still serv­ing Choco­late Derp-it Cake with the rec­om­mended choco­late sour cream frost­ing, since too much frost­ing is never enough and hides an excess of sins behind its two-ingredient goodness.

Did I men­tion the lava drool is delicious?