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" Sure this slice of carrot cake looks delicious now, but wait till you hear what it went through to look this good.   The other day I busted out one of my favorite cookbooks, Babe&amp;#039;s Country Cookbook, a vegetarian recipe book spun off the delightful movie Babe and published in 1998. I just love it! It contains my favorite carrot cake recipe, which I&amp;#039;ve made dozens of times (why so delicious? part of the magic is that it uses baking soda, which the book says keeps the cake super moist -- even after a few days).  Anyway, I set out to make carrot cake, which I had a real hankering for. For the first time in at least a year, I read the instructions fully (once I&amp;#039;ve made something a few times, I tend to skim) -- and saw that the cake should be baked in a round springform pan or a square brownie-type pan. Now, I&amp;#039;ve only ever made it in two layer cake pans, or else in a 9x13 rectangular pan, but this time I decided to follow directions. And as I was pouring the batter into the pan, I thought it was an awful lot of batter to go into one 9-inch springform pan! But I ignored my baking instincts... What a mistake! My cake didn&amp;#039;t fully bake. I took it out of the oven after the proper amount of time, and it looked baked -- all puffy and brown on top, not wiggling at all in the middle. I set it on the cooling rack and left it alone for at least 20 minutes. When I came back, I removed the outer ring of the pan, then flipped the cake over onto a plate, so I could set it on it&amp;#039;s pedestal and frost it. Yikes!!!! The center of the underside collapsed in on itself. My cake was raw in the middle.  What could I do? My mind raced. I got a mini-Bundt pan from the cabinet, then scooped out the raw batter with a spoon, and plopped it into the mini. I turned on my convection toaster oven to 325 degrees, popped the mini in, and hoped for the best.  Then I tried to even out the hole I&amp;#039;d made in the cake. By the time I was done, it looked like I&amp;#039;d baked it in an angel food cake pan (sorta). But the insides were still undercooked, so the cake went back into a 350 degree oven, sitting all alone upside down on a baking sheet. I set the timer for 15 minutes and hoped for the best.   The good news? It all worked! The mini-Bundt pan full of barely-cooked batter baked up light and fluffy, and I ate it right then and there, all warm from the oven. As you can see above, Rich gave the slightly odd-looking twice-baked carrot cake a thumbs up -- and that was with just a dollop of molasses cream cheese frosting. Once I frosted the cake completely, you almost couldn&amp;#039;t tell that it had once been thisclose to being a disaster. But let me tell you something: the lesson I learned, more than how to save a cake flop, was to trust my own instinct when it comes to choosing a pan for cakes or bar cookies. If it looks like way too much batter, next time I&amp;#039;ll just choose a larger pan, regardless of what the recipe says.   "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.redbookmag.com/food-recipes/advice/a2637/the-unbaked-cake/>