Cake Autopsy

This is CSI, cake edition. 

Anyway, this was the first attempt at the cake bit from last week's strawberry cake. So, can anyone tell me what's wrong with it?

It's obvious that it fell, but look closer...

 Ok, so these aren't the best pictures, but the crumb kinda looks like cornbread, doesn't it? Pretty big. 

I thought the cake had just fallen because I knocked it pretty hard when I checked on it in the oven, but it was bugging me because the recipe I used was from Pioneer Woman, from Tasty Kitchen. She's a very thorough woman; if it had been a delicate cake she would have said so, which means I had to look closer. I was not surprised when I found out that I had put half a teaspoon too much baking soda into the cake. Apparently I had used the 1/2 T. measure, not the 1 tsp. measure. (3 teaspoons to the tablespoon)

Now, I hadn't put so much extra in that the cake tastes bad. Thankfully that means my dad is perfectly happy to eat it. I offered to spruce it up a bit, maybe some cooked caramel apple topping, but he refused. At least it's being enjoyed though, because it didn't ask to be made wrong, and I owe it more than that.

So, what did we learn?

1. This is what too much baking soda looks and acts like. Remember so you can diagnose your own oops in the future.

2. Cake made wrongly isn't always garbage; taste your failures and see what you can do with them. You paid for those ingredients and you spent the time making the cake. Unless it's burnt to a crisp (cajun style I like to call it) or otherwise severly damaged, you can probably save it, just not in the form you intended.

3. Take your time. If you rush through because you don't have the time, you're going to make a mistake and then spend more time fixing it or doing it over. Easy to say, less easy to do.