The cake was dry. The chopped ginger added weird grainy/stringy texture. And worst of all it wasn't even gingery.
If it's not my baking karma, it could be that my powder ginger is way too old that it has lost its chi. Or that I overbaked the cake (I baked the cake in two 9 inch cake pans for 30 minutes.) Or that I left the cake out for too long (20 hours uncovered) before frosting.
I might have solved all these dry-non-gingery-cake problems, had I trusted my instinct to make a ginger syrup to soak the cake.
To make the matters worse, I decided to bake brownies for Valentines. I went with this recipe because I have an old box of unsweetened chocolate (first mistake.) And then I decided not to follow the recipe at all because I don't have a microwave to melt the chocolate and I didn't have enough butter (HUGE mistake.)
The brownies, although looking very pretty cut out with my heart cookie cutter, were dry, crumbly and not very chocolaty. I'm trying to decide whether I should damage control by stopping baking for now. Cutting my lost by just throw away the rest of the brownies. Or whether I should not waste the dry brownies and improvise chocolate pudding out of them (and very possibly post another failed baking attempt for your amusement.)
Maybe the Universe is trying to tell me something. How do one increase one's baking karma?
