Baking failures hurt so bad (AM)

It was my Mum's birthday on the weekend. Props to my Mum for totally nailing 67 years of life!
I hope she lives for another 67. Actually, I hope she never ever dies, but 67 more years seems like a good interim target. As a gift, I cooked her a nice lunch comprised of her favourite things: Gnocchi with napoli sauce, followed by lemon cake. I also bought her a pair of socks and a tote bag, but they are not important to the story, because this is a story about disappointment and she really liked the gifts.

In truth, the gnocchi was also very successful, so I won't bother talking about that either.

Delicious little guys

But the cake, guys. The cake was an effing disaster from start to finish.
Because it was Mum's birthday, I wanted it to be super special, and settled on a lemon layer cake, with raspberry jam and marscapone filling, and lemon marscapone icing. It was going to be beautiful and delicious and she was going to love the shit out of it!

My first mistake was made at the pan greasing stage. Even though I thought I was being thorough, I guess I wasn't at all, because the entire bottom  of one of the cakes stuck to the pan. I tried to salvage it and it ended up looking like this:

Yikes.

The other cake came out fine, so at this point I should have just abandoned the layer cake idea but I pressed on. I figured that I could overcome the above mess through creative sandwiching. My fellow cake eaters would be none the wiser. Plus, there was icing and  icing hides a lot of sins, right?

Right, unless icing IS THE SIN.
You guys, when you think that it's fine to replace cream cheese with marscapone in a cream cheese frosting, and you also think that you probs don't need to follow a recipe because you successfully made cream cheese frosting one other time, you are WRONG. Instead of making marscapone lemon icing, I made what looked like curdled lemon slurry. It just did not come together at all. There were lumps galore. Though very concerned about the appearance of this 'icing', I piled it on the cake anyway and hoped it would be OK. It was far from OK. It continued to look like curdled lemon slurry, and refused to adhere to the cake itself. It just slid right off like some sort of curdled lumpy slime. It looked disgusting. It did nothing to patch together my broken cake. 

I really effed it up, people. I stood there for ages wondering what to do and feeling super humiliated because I had effed it up so bad. And all the while the icing kept sliding off the cake and pooling at the bottom of the plate like a moat. Like a moat of shattered dreams. It hurt so bad!

I considered turfing the whole thing but it seemed dramatic, and plus, the cake itself tasted pretty good. And, my Mum is the kind of person who considers making an effort and executing your vision to be completely equal. She's a pretty nice lady.
I ended up wiping every shred of icing off the cake and leaving it nude. It looked terrible, but as predicted, she loved it.

The ugliness continued when we couldn't find any birthday candles and so stuck this giant candle in it and sang happy birthday. Mum said she preferred the big candle, because that way she could be sure she would blow it out. She's such a good sport.

Ew.