Kitchen F#!% Ups

This cake ended up delicious and even looked decent once I did quite a bit of structural intervention. My first problem was with the caramel. I normally make caramel based on how it looks – I don’t use a thermometer. But I have a habit of following a recipe exactly the first time, especially when baking, so I stuck my thermometer in and waited… too long. Caramel will burn very quickly and I took about 15 seconds too long to remove it from the heat. First batch burned.
Second problem came with the layers of cake. They were very delicate. I wonder if I could have cooked them slightly longer, but they kind of stuck to the cooling rack, and I could tell I was going to have difficulty getting the layers stacked up.
I started building the layers: cake, whipped caramel ganache, fleur de sel. I got all three layers stacked up, covered them with a crumb coat, and carried it to the refrigerator to firm up. Except as I moved it to the refrigerator the layers began to slide around on the caramel, and two of them cracked and the entire thing began to disintegrate. I did the best I could to shore it up and continued on to finish frosting it.
There was more ganache than I needed so I stored the rest in the refrigerator just in case. Good thing. When I took the cake out after dinner, part of the ganache on top had slid off the top of the cake. The whole cake had shifted and stuck to the side of the dome top of my cake plate, so it tore off a bunch of ganache when I removed it.
I made do with what I had and cut pieces off of the sections that weren’t ripped or melting. Later, I used the leftover ganache to do a patch job, and it ended up working out pretty well. And the cake, well, it’s really fabulous.

• Sweet & Salty Cake (Baked: New Frontiers in Baking, p. 67)