Failcakes are best baked at about 3AM, when you have a random craving for cake, but most places are either closed or sold out of cake.  Failcakes bring immense satisfaction because it’s hard to make it taste completely terrible, even though it fails as a cake in general, and hey, you invented it!

My failcake I made last night is a chocolate failcake with lemon/vanilla failfrosting.  It started out with two cups of flour, 1 cup sugar, 1 tsp baking powder, 2 tsps vanilla extract, 1 egg, and 4 squares of melted semi-sweet baking chocolate squares.  This ended up mixing into a powdery dough-like substance, so another egg, a pat of butter, and a splash of canola oil was added.  Still too dough-y and not enough like batter, a cup of water was added.  This made it taste like chocolate flavored liquid chalkdust, so another 6 squares of chocolate were added, as well as a little more flour to thicken it up a bit.  Because there was no baking soda to be had, another egg was added, because it couldn’t hurt, right?

Once I got the batter tasting halfway decent, I poured it into a greased and dusted 9″ round baking pan.  The cake ended up being baked for about 40 minutes, but probably could have gone another 20, as it came out rather undercooked and brownie-like.   Failcakes shall not be soft and delicate, but heavy and brick-like!  Actually, mine came out more like a brownie than cake.

Then it was time for the failfrosting.  Intending to make a sort of buttercream, the last of my butter, about half an inch of a stick, was mixed with powered sugar, and then one tsp. of vanilla extract and one tsp. of lemon juice was added.  Taste tests proved this to be rather like sour candy, so more sugar was added to dilute the flavor.  This made a sugar dough.  Because there was no more butter, milk ended up being used to thin the failfrosting.

When your failcake is cool, frost it with failfrosting!   Be careful about feeding it to other people who can sue you for food poisoning.  Also keep it in the fridge, because who knows if it got cooked enough.  Once your failcake spends the night in the fridge, it will be like a brick you have to carve at with your fork, but that’s okay!  You’ve made a failcake!

And mine is delicious!

My “sunset” yakisoba, or in this case, yakiudon, is named for it’s bright colors.  It’s fast, easy to make, and only requires chopping and stirring!

Ingredients

- 4 packets of udon or yakisoba noodles (not dry)

- 1 bottle of Otafuku Yakisoba sauce (Available at Don Quijote)

- 1 yellow bell pepper

- 1 orange bell pepper

- Beef, however much you want.

- kamaboko (pink and white fish cake)

- sesame oil

Step 1:  Chop up the beef into small pieces.  When I make my yakisoba, I think of beef as a garnish, rather than a main part, so I use only a small amount.

Step 2:  Chop up the bell peppers and mix up the colors!  So pretty!

Step 3:  Chop up the kamaboko!

Step 4:  Grease the frying pan with sesame oil, and cook the beef thoroughly.

Step 5:  Add in the bell peppers and kamaboko.  Stir around for a bit to get the bell peppers slightly cooked.

Step 6:  Add in the noodles!  Make sure to gently break apart the clumps.

Step 7:  Add in the sauce.  Use as much sauce as it takes to coat the ingredients, but you can add extra if you like your yakisoba extra flavorful.

Step 8:  Stir stir stir!  Stir until the sauce has coated all the ingredients.

And that’s it!  It’s a great meal for college students, as the ingredients (except the sauce, I admit…) are fairly cheap, and if you’re cooking for yourself, you should have leftovers for lunch the next day.  I also experiment with ingredients, sometimes adding tofu, mushrooms, and other things to the stir-fry.  Hope you all enjoy it!