Cheat days revisited / Red Velvet Debacle

In a previous post, I posed the question "Should I keep having cheat days/meals?"

I think I may have figured out what I need to do. On those days, I just need to work out like a motherf*#@!r. I was on the treadmill for 6 miles on Saturday, which is the farthest I've ever traveled on foot at one time. Then, I did another 5 miles on Sunday. I had quite a few cheat items over the weekend and still didn't gain weight. Woot woot!

February 16th was my mom's birthday, and it was a "milestone birthday," which I guess makes it extra-super-deluxe-special. She always makes a wonderful birthday cake for me, and in previous years I've just bought a store-made one for her. I didn't want to do that this year, so I opted to make a red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting.

Let me say that I'm not a very accomplished baker, mainly because I hardly ever do it. I love cooking, but baking requires a level of precision I'm not used to. I read the reviews of the recipe, and many said that it was dry, but this could be fixed by adding 1/4 cup oil to the batter, which I did. The batter tasted great (yes, I licked the spatula), and the cake smelled good as it was cooking. The icing was awesome. Basically, I tasted each component as I was making it. But, you can't really slice into the thing after it's assembled to see if it's good or not. It would be kind of rude to present a birthday cake with a big chunk of it already missing. So, I just hoped it would be as delicious as it looked.

Sadly, not so much. It was really dry and the cake wasn't sweet enough. The icing was still awesome, though.

This turn of events was a bummer on two different levels:
1) My mom's 60th birthday cake sucked. A person who is 60 obviously deserves a yummy cake on her birthday, not a sucky dry one.
2) I wasted calories on a cake that wasn't awesome.

Then, I had another piece. Heh.