Confetti Layer Cake with Miracle Frosting

In my casual and haphazard pursuit of improved skills at various aspects of the kitchen craft, I ponder from time to time how to get better with my cakes, which are so often hit-or-miss. Practice is called for. My eye has been caught by some recipes in recent issues of my various cooking magazines, and I worked into the late hours of a Saturday night not long ago to give one of these a trial run.

The results were not good. The cake layers did not puff up and were painfully and densely underwhelming. The approach to this frosting was rather out of the norm for me and actually took several hours (which gave my cooked cake layers too long to also dry out and develop a stiff crust).

This was one of those cakes that could only be served to Roediger House regulars, who are generously forgiving of my kitchen experiments. I was so disgusted with it, I sent the whole thing home with Sunday night's dinner guest.

The bright spot was the batch of ice cream I made along with it: butterscotch pecan. This was a new ice cream for me to try and it was absolutely delicious. I'll cut the amount of roasted buttered pecans in half next go-round, though.

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"Confetti Layer Cake," from The Great American Cake series in Cook's Illustrated, April/May 2014, p. 33 (inside back cover).

"Miracle Frosting," by Bridget Lancaster. In Cook's Country, October/November 2010, p. 26.

"Butterscotch Pecan Ice Cream" (p. 44) and "Buttered Pecans" (p. 195), by David Lebovitz. In The Perfect Scoop, Ten Speed Press (Berkeley/Toronto),  2007, p. 72.