Another (salvaged) high-altitude baking misadventure

There is a sense of deja vu while writing this post. Like this has been discussed before. Oh well, it's life.

This is a cake baked at high altitude. (Kind of like the roads at high altitude this time of year.)

It is the beginnings of a cake for a birthday. I needed to bake a second batch for this particular creation, and decided to try a different approach from my usual one of filling in the craters with icing (which is kind of nasty to eat, IMO). So I made two cake batter "cookies" approximately the size of the holes.Here they are in place prior to being frosted:

Voila!
The finished product:

Her first sight of it:

It was all worth it for that, right?

And there isn't a picture of it after it was cut, but if you didn't know, you wouldn't even notice that anything had ever been amiss!