I can't bake.

Well, that's partly true. I can take a cake mix and turn it into a scrumptious cake. However, the required ability to make a zeppelin cake is several orders of magnitude greater than what I have. Clearly, I need to level up much more.

HOWEVER.

The fact that an attempt has been made, a delicious, AMAZING attempt, is still a step in the right direction. I know that on this blog, we promote pie, but I made an exception for zeppelin cake. It's a chocolate gooey lumpy mass that looks nothing like a zeppelin but oh my God does it taste good.

I warn you now; many cake mixes died for this. Along with a large part of my pride. But it just.. it just tastes so good... So, again. If you know how to bake, you probably shouldn't read this. It will cause too much pain.

But! For your entertainment! Here we go!

(A note: the photographer in these pictures is Susan, who helped me but bears no blame for what happened)

Here is what we were going for:

First off, I made three cakes from a mix. Two came out perfectly, but one was a little bitch and fell apart. Non-stick pan my ass. It was immediately partially consumed and turned into something resembling delicious cement.

We cut the two good cakes apart and put them together, then began trimming them. This is the first point where we messed up, I think: we left the tops as they were instead of taking the hard goodness from the top and making them, you know, flat.

I took the parts that I had cut off and, in order to make it more 3D, used them to hold cake stuff- they were like walls. I then put stuff from the parts-cake inside these little walls. It was not exactly the stuff zeppelins are made of.

Here's the final image before we started making it amazing:

I knew that something had to be done to make it not just a pile of cake. What holds cake together? Frosting, of course! However, it was impossible to spread frosting on that cake, what with it not being... uh... cake-like. So, we threw two big things of chocolate frosting in the microwave and started pouring it over the cake.

This had the effect of making it DELICIOUS beyond belief. Also, we put a TON of frosting on there.

At this point, it looked, well, yeah. But! It had a little gondola! We need some kind of definition in there. Being the nonbaker that I am, the only thing we could come up with was caramel ice cream syrup, the kind of that hardens on cold stuff. So, to the freezer the cake went!

Unfortunately, as it was freezing, it lost containment and part of it blew up. We took it out and put the caramel on and ended up with this:

Look, I know it's not pretty. I know what you're thinking. But I assure you. It is rigid dirigible DELICIOUSNESS. Also, this cake is gigantic, and I definitely need some help eating it. Any takers?