I can't cut down the 12 inch cake board to a 10 inch circle cake board well enough to smoothly ice the cake. I just need to bite the bullet and go buy some 10 inch circles.
If you freeze the frosting it is easy to pipe onto, but it sweats a little as it warms up. Is that worth it?
It takes one recipe of rice krispie treats to fill up one 10 inch pan, so I will need to make the recipe 3 times. That's a lot of washing of pans and counting of cups of rice krispies!
I needed to make my pin marks bigger on my paper so my pin would easily slide through the hole and not make the paper stick to the frosting. Toothpicks worked great to widen the holes.
If the white frosting is too thin, just squeeze it out and whip it up more!
You can't go too slow while piping or you get the jiggly hand lines. You can't go too fast or you don't have control over the design as well, plus it's more likely to fall off and not even stick! And I can't pipe designs with my elbows resting on the table. They need to be in the air like I have wings.
When you freeze the cakes, make sure they are resting on something flat!
When a recipe calls for buttermilk, by golly use buttermilk, or some other acid since it won't rise without it!
It's best to cool the cake completely in the pan before removing because it is soooo soft when it's warm. Hence the reason it calls for parchment rounds at the bottom of the pans, which I have yet to try!
Lastly, don't try to do the whole process in one day, even for just the 8 inch layer!
I made the cake for the shower...disaster cake! I almost gave up and just made a trifle with the cake, it was that bad. The cakes didn't rise and I didn't freeze them before I tried to stack them and they didn't have time to sufficiently cool before I iced them and I don't know how I pulled it together as well as I did. It was a shower miracle. To get the 3 layer 8 inch cake to my grandma's I put it on the glass plate it would be served on and used towels around the plate to keep it snug in a box, and then put towels in the crease of the seat to make the box flat, and finally seatbelted the box in! Yes, yes I did. I only had my cell phone with me that night, which take awesomely vintage-esque overexposed photos. Check out the ride to the shower and displayed at Grandma's:
I was hoping I could improve a lot on this cake. I'm a slow learner!
So I made Baby's birthday cake with the same recipes, and it was slightly better. The cakes didn't freeze flat and one didn't rise right and I didn't leave myself enough time to frost carefully. It turned out nice enough for Baby. He loved it.
Since I still needed practice I made a 10 inch rice krispie cake, only 2 layers. I iced it, but it wasn't super smooth because my cake circle wasn't a perfect circle. It worked for icing practice though. I piped it on and then used my bench scraper to pull it all off and start again. I practiced 3 times I think. I can see a little improvement in my hearts, although I didn't get them close enough to the top. I wonder if I can fix my paper stencil so that it lays flat against the cake, not on the table... See the remnants of previous practices at the bottom of this shot:
And then I took a break. The real deal starts on Monday. That's right folks. That's 3 days away. I will bake and bake and bake and then freeze on Monday!!! I hope all my trial and error pulls through and the cake is wedding-worthy!
Wish me luck.