Birthday Extravaganza!!
Posted in Recipes on 12/14/2009 10:50 pm by enjanerdA couple people I know were celebrating birthdays a couple weekends ago, so I volunteered to make cakes!
TattooGirl was turning 30 and her husband threw a party for her. It was a little hindered by the snow that day, but there was still a good turnout and we had loads of fun! And after driving 45 minutes to MD, I even met one of my neighbors… Go figure.
So, not knowing how many people to expect at this party, I decided an 8″ round cake would not be sufficient (~15 servings). I knew there would be at least 13 people, but didn’t know about the maybes or people who didn’t reply. Unfortunately, I don’t have a 9″ round cake pan, so I had to go with the 10″ cake pan Anna lent me for the second tier of a wedding cake (~30 servings). Everyone likes extra cake… and I figured it would be good practice for me anyway.
Ian’s mom’s birthday was also that weekend, so I made a cake for their Gilmore night dinner. For that one, I made a 6″ cake, which I’ve been using for practice.
I decided to go with the same cake for both just to simplify things: Caramel Chocolate Cake. I attempted to make a caramel syrup, but was a little impatient, so I mostly just made a plain syrup. I was also still intimidated by the meringue buttercream frosting in the wedding cake books, and with my stand mixer out of commission, I went with my old standby simple buttercream. I used a caramel frosting for the filling and chocolate frosting for the top and decorating.
I tried out the star tip on the 10″ cake, which worked out pretty well. But the frosting I made was too liquidy to hold its shape on the side of the cake, so I had to resort to just piping lines around the side. I was going to try out a basket weave on the 6″ cake, but had trouble again because of the consistency of my frosting. So I just went with stripes.
Things to work on:
- Brushing more syrup on the layers
- Leveling layers
- Making frosting
- Piping
