Needles to say the cake did not turn out correctly.
Actually, your cake turned out perfectly. You could have left out a variety of ingredients, or add various ingredients (but perhaps not those needles) and mixed them in any order and your cake would still have turned out "correctly". That is, it would have been edible and nutritious - it just wouldn't have been what you and your niece happened to be expecting. But nature has no such expectations. It just does what it does and if something it happens to do is capable of reproducing somewhat similar copies of itself (a la crystals, rain drops, etc.) and is able to evolve into more fecund forms, then you have life. Evolvability is actually the simplest step - all it takes is the ability to undergo random variations of its various parameters and selection, which is just the statistical law of averages, will do the rest.