Lemons into Lemonade

I'm going to let you in on a little secret...I'm not perfect.  Ok, it's not really a secret, but I very rarely show you the fails and the messes that occur on a regular basis.  I did show you a pic of my living room in an un-gussied-up state here.  And today I'm going to share a fail from a little while ago.  Except when you roll with the punches, there's no reason to call it a fail.  Cake rolls are fun to make, and I often make Buche de Noel at Christmas, and Pumpkin Rolls for Thanksgiving.  I had started the day off thinking I'd make a Strawberry Jelly Roll.  I bubbled away some strawberries to make the jelly filling,

sifted my flours together, whisked my egg yolks & sugar, mixed it all together, whipped up some egg whites, and folded them in.

Jelly Rolls are made like any other cake roll.  The cake comes out of the oven, and you sprinkle the top with powdered sugar, lay a clean kitchen towel on top, invert the pan, sprinkle the other side with more powdered sugar, and roll it up with the towel rolled up, too.

After letting it cool for 20 minutes rolled up, you unroll the cake, and spread it with the filling.  In this case, it was a layer of pastry cream, followed by the strawberries.

I rolled the cake back up, this time without the towel, and placed it in the frig to set.  Meanwhile, I hopped in the shower to get ready to leave for the party that I was bringing the cake to.  The last thing to do was to transfer the cake from the cooling rack onto the pretty cake plate.  I didn't do this before the refrigerating step, because my footed cake plate takes up so much room, I'd have to rearrange the frig to put it in.  Here comes the fail.

I had set my footed cake plate entirely to close to the edge of my counter, and as I was transfering the cake, I bumped it, and it started falling.  I made a quick move to save the crystal cake plate, and dropped my jelly roll on the counter in a big splat.  I might have sworn like a sailor, then started sniffling.  Without time to make another dessert, I scooped the mess into a trifle dish.  It didn't fill up the dish, but I threw some whipped cream swirls on top.  Perfect is overrated.

Thanks for popping in and messing up with me.