02-24-14-coca-cola-cake-3

 

I just threw out a cake. A homemade cake. That I made.

I have to admit that I have not thrown out too many cakes in my life. I’m a cake-eater and – for better or worse – can eat just about any of them out there. But I met my match, tonight.

I don’t drink soda as a rule, but a couple times a year I can go for an ice-cold Coke. Real Coke. The stuff made in every country but the USofA. – with sugar – and not high fructose corn syrup. At $1.25 a bottle, it’s pricey enough that I’m not downing six-packs of the stuff, but eminently affordable to have around. There’s been a bottle in the cupboard for a couple of months that I first thought I’d use to make a BBQ sauce. Today, out of the blue, I decided to make a Coca-Cola cake.

I should have made the BBQ sauce.

I got the recipe from the Coca-Cola website. I had done a bit of searching and just about every recipe out there was identical. I thought I’d go with the pro. It was horrible. The cake was moist and all – but it just had no flavor.  And the icing was nothing but sugar-flavored sugar.

Victor summed it up perfectly: “All I can taste is sweet. There is no flavor, at all – just cloying sweet.”

What a disappointment.

I went back and read comments on the Coke site and while a couple of folks didn’t like it, either, we’re in the minority. Most folks who have made it love it.

I have to admit I didn’t know what to expect because I had never had one, before, but the ingredient list should have given me a bit of an alert – 2 cups of sugar and a cup of Coke is going to make a sweet cake no matter what else goes in it. And the icing was just more sugar and more Coke.

I guess it would have been nice if there had been a hint of Coke flavor – but it was buried under all the sugar.

Oh well… Live and learn.