There's a reason this blog isn't called Post-Graduate Cake

And not just because that doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

I have recently tried making cake twice and both have been utter structural failures. The first time, I saw a holiday chip cake mix on sale at Kroger and an idea struck me: 'I will make a Welcome Home cake for Eric for his first visit home. It will be adorable!' I even bought decorative icing. I was invested in this plan. So the week of his visit I set out to make the cake. Everything was fine until I tried to take the cake out of the cake pans. At which point I realized my cake pans were NOT in fact non-stick, as I had just sort of assumed (they were dark-ish? I don't know).

Anyway, this was rather upsetting, so I ate a few cake pieces and then abandoned the thing. What can you do with cake that is in a million bits. Nothing. But I still had icing left, so when I passed the cake mixes in the grocery store today en route to get bread crumbs, and saw that Jiffy Cake Mix is like less than a dollar, I thought--ah ha! I will redeem myself and make a new cake to put the icing on!

Not so much.

This cake ALSO fell apart in the removal-from-the-pan stage, despite my diligent greasing and flouring of the pan! Readers, what am I doing wrong? I thought I let the cake cool enough, but does it have to be like cold-cold before you take it out (for the record, with the first cake, I took it out of the pan a whole day later)? What is the secret?!?