THE CAKE!~

Professional pictures (from http://www.morganleighphotography.net/) ... please do not copy.
Here's how the cake turned out.
Happy Wedding my dearest Laura!

The End.

Done!

Well, the wedding day has long since come and gone. In the rush to get over to the wedding and finish decorating before family pictures, I forgot my nice camera! I had to get myself and 4 kids all in our beautiful clothes and do everyone's hair. Luckily my husband was home to help, but we were still running behind the schedule that I was hoping for.
I was waiting for some professional pictures of the cake before posting this, but I have no idea how long that will be! So, here is a post about how the cake turned out!
Monday I cooked all the cakes and froze them. I was able to get most of them flat and froze them flat too. Getting the layers off of the cardboard cake boards after they were frozen was kind of hard. Some of the cake stuck, but it was ok because they were so dense that they were still flat.
Tuesday I made the rice krispie layer and iced all three layers. It took forever since I had to run to the store and buy more butter as I underestimated big time how much frosting I would need. I followed a very precise recipe to try to keep the shade of beige the same, but each batch was the tiniest bit different I think. I ended up going to bed with only the crumb coating on each layer.
The next morning I scraped down all of my work on the rice krispie layer and cut away at the krispies so that they didn't line up straight even with the cake board. I needed a 1/4 inch at least of board showing so that I could use that board to rest my bench scraper on and get a smooth finish.
I ended up getting the cakes all frosted and straight and smooth and back in the fridge during my 2 year olds nap time. Even though the frosting was finally smooth, it was marbled! I think part of the problem was the warm bench scraper changed the color just a little too each time it touched the frosting. I had no idea how to fix that and I decided that maybe it would look like I had planned to make a stone facade frosting all along! When I deemed the frosting hard enough, I took each layer out one at a time, placed my homemade stencil on it, poked holes everywhere I wanted the design, and then put the cake back in the fridge to harden again. I started the white curly/lacey design in the afternoon and was getting more and more disappointed as I went. I kept thinking, "Come on. I know I can do better than this!" But once it's on, it's on! You can scrape the white off if there is a major mistake, which happened a few times, but it leaves a trace behind so I tried not to do that. Finally I added the tiny pearls to the design and then accidentally hit the super soft frosting with my hand! Yes, I did. Then my son did too. So before I ruined it more I put it in the fridge and let it harden.
That evening (Wednesday, day before the wedding), I put each layer in a cardboard box and secured each box in my van and drove over to the house where the reception would be. I got the cakes out and set them on top of each other, only slipping once and indenting it in the middle layer. By this time I just wanted to get the big pearls around each layer and thought that I could patch it up the next day before pictures. I finished and everyone thought it looked great, you know, because they weren't sitting right up next to it like I was. I got the cake into the fridge and went home to bed about 10 pm.
The day of the wedding I made it back to the house in time to get the cake out, put it on the cake table, decorate with candles and glasses I had brought, and try to track down my flowers! I finally found the smallest bouquet of leftover flowers and no one seemed to know where any more were. I was out of time so I stuck what I could into the top and into the cups and hoped no one would notice the places that didn't get patched up or hidden behind flowers.
And you know what? From a distance you really couldn't tell! Even my shaky white lacey details looked ok! And when dusk came and the candles made the sequined table cloth sparkly, it was beautiful.
What a relief. I was so tired the next day. I wanted to sleep for 3 days, but that couldn't really happen. So I just took it as easy as I could and reveled in the satisfaction of having that huge project accomplished! I don't know when I will be up to that task again. It was fun, but the stress of making mistakes on such an important cake was huge.
Some day I will get more pictures for better documentation of the final product!
Until then, here is the picture my husband took on his phone:

Still Practicing

What I've learned lately:

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.

State of the Cake Address

Hello my fellow blog readers.
Tonight we have a report on the progress of my wedding cake journey.
I have begun practicing my hand at smoothing frosting and piping Swiss Buttercream (SBC). I have learned a few things so far.
#1. 2 layers of 8 inch rice krispies are not tall enough. We're gonna need 3 or maybe 4 layers.
#2. To get the rice krispie treats out of the pan, do not try to stick a knife down the side and pry it out. It will only deform the shape. Just hold the pan upside down and shake shake shake whilst pounding the bottom a little and it will fall out cleanly if the pan has been previously greased.
#3. My 8 inch cake pans do not have straight sides! So it was hard to get the frosting really smooth with the bench scraper since it would scrape away only the middle of the cake and not get the top or bottom.
#4. The lacey details is harder than it looks!
I tried to totally free hand it the first time. No bueno:

For the second try I used a different approach. I scraped off all the white frosting, and a little beige, to reuse it, and turned all the extra frosting beige. Oh well. Then I drew out my plan for the details and taped wax paper over the top of the design. I tried 3 different tips and finally found that number 3 works best for me. I piped out the frosting onto the wax paper following my design. This worked pretty great. It's easier to pipe it out on a flat surface than on the side of the cake. However, transferring it to the cake was kind of ridiculous.
#5 If you want to transfer a SBC design onto a SBC frosted cake, the best way is to have the cake really cold and the frosting design still room temperature. Then put the whole cake in the fridge for 10 minutes while the design hardens, and THEN lightly tap the design and pull the paper off. It took lots of trial and error with temperatures to find this out, and I still wasn't happy with the outcome:

So lastly, I tried the approach of putting the paper with the design on top of the frosting and poking little holes through the design into the frosting to give myself a marker for where to pipe.
#6 Don't press hard on the paper or you get finger smudges in the frosting, even through the paper.
#7 SBC pipes better than the traditional Wilton frosting recipe:

I need more practice piping onto the side of the cake. That angle is really hard! So, don't judge yet. I'm still practicing!
But with all that I have learned from these trials cakes, I hope that the Shower Cake this Monday will be pretty cute! A taller base cake with flat sides should be smoother and lace details becoming increasingly uniform and smooth. That's the goal.
Thank you. God bless you.

Let's Build a Wedding Cake

I've got cake on the brain lately. I can't even sleep I'm thinking so much about cakes. Why, you might ask? I am serious about making an outstanding wedding cake for my littlest sister's wedding. The problem is I have never attempted something this big!
Even though Sept 10th, the big day, seems far away, I wanted to get my cake game on now. This is sort of unlike me to plan this far ahead. I'm excellent at procrastinating and becoming productive under pressure. However, I have seen what happens to my birthday cakes under pressure, and the results are all over the board: sometimes they work and sometimes they don't! Luckily I was excited enough about the project to start early, 2 weeks ago to be exact.
I broke this big project down into phases:

Phase 1: Research, research, research. Gather supplies. Finalize the plan.
Phase 2: Recipe taste testings. Make a small version of the recipes in my 6 inch pans.
Phase 3: Practice my icing decorating.
Phase 4: Wedding shower cake practice.
Phase 5: Make and freeze THE cakes.
Phase 6: Frost the cakes.
Final Phase: Put it all together and get it to the reception.

7 phases, that's a lot of work. It's a good thing I started early! Here's where we are, as of today with just less than 6 weeks to go:

Phase 1... complete!
Phase 2... complete!

After sampling Smitten Kitchen's wedding cakes and icing recipes, we have approvals all around. Well, the bride hasn't tasted it, but I'm sure she will love it since all of my other taste testers approved!
One layer will be vanilla cake with strawberry filling. Here is the sample cake we tasted:

The other layer will be chocolate cake with caramel filling. The icing is a brown sugar Swiss Butter Cream. Sample cake:

These cakes haven't had the crumb coating or turn table treatment yet since they were for tasting purposes, but they still turned out pretty beautiful!
Now it's time to practice my smoothing and piping skills!
Stay tuned...

recipes: http://smittenkitchen.com/blog/2008/07/project-wedding-cake-the-cake-is-baked/
http://smittenkitchen.com/blog/2008/07/project-wedding-cake-swiss-buttercream/