What a Beutiful Mess I'm In - Part Three

I'm tired of cake. I never thought I would ever say that in my entire life, but it's absolutely true. I go into Mooncake Prototype Version 3.0 with a heavy heart and am just about to give up when I give it one last great effort and pull myself together to finish the cake. I'm hoping this will be thee FINAL cake that I can submit, but alas, I am wronged.

Here's how Version 3.0 goes:

I must be delusional cuz this mooncake dough is absolutely perfect! Since the last one seemed to melt away from the cake during baking, I decided to revamp Yan Can Cook's recipe by merging it with another one. This was totally an experiment on my part and I didn't know how it was going to turn out, but I was pleasantly surprised by the result. Since there are a variety of mooncake crusts (something I didn't know), I took Yan Can Cook's "chewy" traditional, Cantonese style crust and mixed it with a more Northern style recipe that is flaky like a pastry which I found on Do What I Like's blog. I think my reasoning for this was that I need the chewy texture so that it would cover the cake without tearing and breaking, but I needed the flakiness of the pastry dough so that it would hold it's shape during baking.

 Completed... for now...

As insurance during baking, I locked and loaded the mooncake in a springform pan and used foil-wrapped dowels to keep the ridge-shapes on the sides.

Alright! The color is dead on and I couldn't have been happier with how the designs turned out. The only problem is that the designs are way too small for the size of the cake and need to be bigger. I also made a careless mistake and separated the two parts of the Chinese character. They each mean something separate from each other (the top part means rice plant and the bottom part means fire according to my Chinese teacher) but they're supposed to be right next to each other so that "autumn" is read. I also noticed that some parts of the cake stuck to the springform and came off when I took the form off after baking. Mooncakes aren't perfect by nature, but I really want mine to look pristine.

Here's a top view. When I reread the contest rules and looked through the forum on others' posted questions and answers, I realized that I made a huge error in just the cake base itself. There are 3 layers of 9" cake here to make my base. But in looking over the rules, apparently I'm only allowed a SINGLE 9" cake. Wow. I was doing so good too. Alright, Mooncake Prototype Version 4.0 has to be the final one otherwise I'm going to have to choke someone!! GARRRRRRR!! Seriously?!?! SERIOUSLY!!??