I hate this cake with a passion.

After turning my kitchen upside down, dirtying a bazillion bowls and utensils, and spending 4 hours to create this monster, this Sweet and Salty cake (a salted caramel chocolate cake) turned out to be one extremely fussy and topsy turvy ugly-ass cake.

The recipe comes from the cookbook Baked: New Frontiers in Baking. The photo of the cake in the book looked gorgeous (of course), with layers of rich dark chocolate cake and neat layers of frosting in between. Mine ... not so much. Check out how hideous it turned out:

Though the cake tasted pretty good, it really wasn't worth the effort. I'm not even going to post the recipe for it. I'm so mad at it.

• I managed to cut a slice and make it look semi-presentable.