This was as banal as an easy-bake Alton Brown fruitcake in place of a drunk family legacy.

Your use of parallelism is astounding.

A tip: if your cake is soggy add more dry ingredients. If it is heavy use less fruit, and more leavening agent.

If you are at a loss ask a baker directly and explain how it SHOULD come out.

My God this article sapped my lifeforce with nothing in return. Nothing. I kept reading, imagining that at some point down the line there had to be something interesting or worthwhile...but I have been sadly let down. A story about a cook who, rather than try a couple more times to make the real cake, runs to the almighty Google as a replacement for her family legacy; damn, Salon, WTF? What's next, microbrewer can't figure out father's beer so he decides that Coors will be good enough?

I swear to God this is by far the most useless section of the website. You got rid of Audiofile and the Fix and brought on Opus and this? What are you guys smoking? At least provide an interesting recipe, maybe something out of the ordinary that people could try at home. Maybe some mixed drinks, or a summer appetizer. Something that makes clicking through to an article worth the time it takes to read. Which this, by far, wasn't.

Waste not, want not, and on my deathbed I will want for the 15 minutes more I used to endure this article. Even the subheading reads like the most boring "Dear Abby" column ever written. I can just imagine the rest of it now:

Dear Abby,

My grandmother came from Panama and she would, without fail, make a Panamanian bride's cake for every wedding, stretching out to my cousins. She's gone now, and I'm the cook of the family, so it fell to me to continue the tradition. But disaster struck! When I opened the oven, I had a pan of boozy fruit slop. I really don't feel like trying again, and this other cake on Google seems good enough. What should I do?

Meh, Any Cake's Fine.

Dear Meh,

I'm afraid I was so bored by your letter I died.

Sincerely,

Abby

God, I just want to mock this article into the ground it was so boring. If an article is bad, let it be bad, I can revel in bad, I can accept bad. But this article was so offensively mediocre it warrants a full-bore sarcasm barrage.

Get rid of Opus, bring on Get Fuzzy and make this a more worthwhile section.

Jesus.

why are we reading this? oh yes-- it was a *panamanian* wedding cake, not duncan hines. makes all the difference.

There was nothing wrong with your grandmother's recipes--you simply didn't follow them. You can't use a blender to grind fruit and nuts. Your grandmother probably used a grinder--one of those metal things with a handle that you turn that attach to your counter that you can use to grind meat, spices, etc. It is a great tool to have in your kitchen. A food processor would also do the job, but take up a lot more space. When you added more liquid to grind the fruit, you ruined the recipe.

I inherited a bunch of old baking recipe books from the 30s and 40s. You would be amazed at how much more complicated the recipes are. It seems we have lost the ability to follow intricate instructions...

...right until the end. I'm not going to claim the author was a bad or lesser person for going with Alton Brown; if the cake was good, it was good, and the family being together for the wedding is really what matters.

But I do recommend she talk to a baker-- perhaps the good folk at King Arthur Flour-- and listen to the posters about what went wrong. It would be a shame to have the true recipe lost. (And if you do figure it out, share-- it sounds delish!)

What is it about first-person food articles and Salon? So often, the authors seem to be chosen for either their admitted incompetence or the emotional baggage that prevents them from enjoying food. On the most basic level, how hard would it have been for the author to acquire a food processor and a large enough bowl to hold all the ingredients? (It's not that it would have been all that large a bowl, either, judging from the size of the three baking pans she says she used.)

Much as I love Alton Brown, his fruitcake is a highly idiosyncratic one, and its ingredients -- sundried blueberries and cranberries -- couldn't be more alien to the author's Panamanian heirloom recipe. Several previous letter writers have already given terrific advice on what would have been better choices.

Maybe the temp wasn't fahrenheit?

Why is it that Salon's "food writers" are all incompetent novices? Is it supposed to be funny that a grown person can't figure out how to read a recipe or how to get a full meal on the table at the right temperature?

This person just sounds stupid. "The recipe called for a food processor, but I don't have one and decided the blender would have to do?" Come. On. Use your head: the recipe was asking you to create a sort of flour by grinding nuts very fine. Blender chunks won't do it.

Do we need to know you're so befuddled you can't remember to put the top on the blender? That's not funny, it's lame.

This is not genius stuff. Not following directions connects you with your cultural heritage? Give me a break.

Next time try www.epicurious.com and go to the home cooking board. They'll help you.

I just wanted to point out that the headline of this article ("My big, nasty Panamanian bride's cake") reads like one of those classic examples of humorously misplaced modifiers that they give you in Journalism 101, or various email forwards. It took me a moment to realize that "bride's cake" must be the noun phrase being modified, and not just "bride".