If you have read any of my previous blog posts or know me at all you might understand that I'm a bit of a disaster, wrapped in calamity, and topped with the essence of a bull in the china shop. When Betty Spite asked me to make her wedding cake, I said yes. You may question why. I know I did.
I figured that I am pretty much capable of anything if I try (I once hung a door with a leatherman and a bread knife- since then I've been unstoppable), so I started by doing a little bit of research and then making practice cake after practice cake. I choose my roommates family recipe for Hot Water Chocolate Cake. And although it does not rise as much as a box mix will, it has a delicious rich flavor and is a sinch to make.
Versions one, two and three of this cake were mostly to develop flavor and texture and to get the recipe down pat. After version 3.0 I decided that the cake, though delicous might just weigh too much for a wedding cake. So when making 4.0 (Jillian's birthday cake) I tried to doctor up a boxed mix, cut each layer in half, and fill it with frosting.
Everyone at Jillian's birthday party were like "oh this cake is so good" and "lauren did you really make this?" I'm pretty sure they were just drunk. Drunk people think any cake is good cake, beileve me, I'm a pro at this. The cake wasn't bad, it was just ordinary and what I would call an asctetic monstrosity. The wedding was a week away, the frosting had crumbs all through it, the cake was all but falling apart and I was officially in panic mode.
I dedicated the following Sunday to making 5.0. After going to the craft store to buy new pans and other equiptment to build the cake and four trips to the grocery store (why doesn't anyone sell buttermilk!?!) I sat down in my kitchen to develop a new plan. Clearly using the slicing and filliing technique was out. I decided that the safest thing to do was bake thin layers and stackign those on top of eachother. No slicing. No crumbs.
I mixed it up a little bit by baking half of the layers with that Chocolate Hot Water Cake and the other half with what I like to call Wicked Pissah Velvet Cake. It wasn't until I tried baking these thin layers that I realized my oven was lopsided. SHIT.FUCK.POOP. I would have to find another oven to bake the final product in.
The next day I stacked them up and glued them together with buttercream frosting. I used dowels to keep the cake together and even practiced driving it to my weekly kickball game. My teammates were willing taste testers since I couldn't even think about eating any more cake. It received rave reviews (before they were wasted, so I actually kinda believed them) and best of all I discovered that when you stack the chocolate then red velvet then chocolate then red velvet then chocolate with the pretty white buttercream inside. OY! It was so beautiful! Maybe I could do this after all.
(that isn't a fifty as much as it is a 5.0)
I took the day before the wedding off from work and started baking at my friend Sarah's house around ten o'clock. Her oven was level, thank God and after a few hours I had all the layers cooked and cooled. I transported them a few blocks to my house and whipped up some butter cream to stack them. Later that day I had my first experiementation with fondant.
December 31st 2007: ** augh. I haven't posted since august because writing about Betty Spite's wedding cake adventure was too much pressure. So I will just say this: Betty Spite got married, she was beautiful, her wedding was perfect and I didn't drop the cake! hip hip hooray!!! **
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