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At my church's bazaar in October it was discovered that full cake or pie sold better in terms of demand and higher price. For that event I had baked some cupcakes. Our church is having another bake sale this weekend. Yesterday morning I went to buy the ingredients:

As I was walking to the grocery store (this was on Friday morning) it occurred to me only then that I have no cake carrier of any kind in order to transport the cake from my apartment to the church and for the person buying it to get it from the church to their home. The grocery store had nothing so I ordered some cake boxes from Amazon for next day delivery. Uncertain whether or not these boxes would arrive in time for the 16h mass today played a role in what happened next.

We had another event at our church this morning for which I was volunteering and left over in the kitchen were two of these from the bazaar:

Since it was flagged for future use I decided I would take one in case the cake boxes hadn't arrived yet; and when I got home, they still hadn't arrived. So I went ahead with my plan. First was to make the cake batter with water, vegetable oil, eggs and of course the cake mix and pour it into the two baking pans:

Then to bake them; after the baking, one had ended up being bigger than the other. I only eye-balled it to see about getting the two the same; ideally the difference wouldn't be so significant.

After I let them cool down a little I moved them to two cutting boards and chopped off at least some of the mound that results when baking in the oven, to make the two layers reasonably flat.

I watched a yTube video to give me some tips, one of which was to put four rectangular sheets of parchment paper beneath so that when iced, the tray holding the cake can be kept clean. Doing this, however, made it difficult to center the cake on the circular cake tray. Another tip was to put it upside down, so that the bottom side as it was in the oven which is smooth and flat, becomes the top side to do the icing.

Start with a dollop in the center and spread it out, when more is needed, put another dollop close to the center but on the side of the circle where it is needed.

It wasn't smoothed out particularly well and there are crumbs embedded, this will be buried, however, between the two layers.

Then, as before, flip over the second layer. In this one it can be seen that some of the 'bottom' of that part of the cake got stuck to the baking pan.

Now the top is iced.

Now the sides are iced.

I tried to smooth it out as best I could. The lady on the yTube video made this part look so easy.

And then I took the parchment paper away from the sides and it is clear that I didn't not center the cake particularly well.

I put the top of the cake carrier on and put it into the fridge to firm it up before heading over to the church to bring it for sale. If it does sell, and if I do get the boxes, I will considering doing this all over again either tonight or early tomorrow as I bought enough of all of the ingredients to make two. I did this in particular because once the icing I bought is opened it is only good for thirty days and so by doing the second cake I will use up more of it without waste.

UPDATE: the cake boxes I ordered arrived at 19h20 and so I baked and iced another one: