If You Give a Girl a Cookie: lemon sour cream pound cake fail.

It's been far too long since I last confessed an epic baking disaster to you. Surely you've been following me blindly, foolishly believing I've had one success after another when really, I've pitched more cakes, cookies and curdled batches of frosting into the garbage than I should admit. I'm having a [mostly] fun time planning our 2011 nuptials, but my brain feels awfully distracted by floral arrangements and dress fittings and, sadly enough, it's showing in my baking. C'mon, Britt! Get it together!

Although this time, I'm convinced it was a recipe failure and not one on my part. Or maybe that's just my pride talking. The last epic kitchen disaster I told you about was that awful s'mores pie that left the kitchen smoked up and me in tears, and this one was a close second. I'd been on the prowl for a lemon ginger pound cake for quite some time [more to come on that] and still being in my I'm not going to the grocery store mode, I settled on this recipe for lack of crystallized ginger in my pantry.

It started out fine and well, a fluffy cream of sugar and butter followed by what I thought was an obscene amount of eggs - six of them, actually - for a pound cake. I was a little hesitant at first but there was only a half teaspoon of baking soda in the dry ingredients, so I took heart that the eggs would give it the extra lift. Onward!

Well no, it did not. One side of the cake collapsed halfway through the baking time and it left a two inch gap between the outer crust and the soft insides. And speaking of baking time, the original recipe called for 90 minutes when really, it was borderline burned at 55 minutes. Seriously, who tests these!? I almost expected it to read, "Bake until it catches on fire or a toothpick comes out clean."

The inside, in all its eggy glory, was more like a spongy scrambled egg, flecked through with bits of yolk and that unmistakable texture of cooked egg white - bleh. I thought I could salvage it a bit with a tart and lemony glaze slicked across the top, but there's only so much a girl can do, ya know?

My mother, being the saint that she is, ate two pieces [although soaked in the glaze, or 'dressing' as she calls it] and raved that she loved the "crusty part with all the sugary stuff on it." God love her, she's the best.