Birthday Extravaganza!!

Posted in Recipes on 12/14/2009 10:50 pm by enjanerd

A 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.

001b

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.

006b

Things to work on:
- Brushing more syrup on the layers
- Leveling layers
- Making frosting
- Piping

 

7 Comments

  1. You should just try the recipe in the book, her directions are really easy to follow! Also I used a little squeeze bottle instead of a brush for the syrup. I thought it was easier. Good job on the cakes! Isn’t it fun?

  2. Aww, thanks for the encouragement! I’m going for it this week. I can taste the difference between the frostings and the one from the book is so much better!

    I might have to try the squeeze bottle. I’m going to give the brush one more chance though. I’m going to pour the syrup into a measuring cup before I start so I’ll have a better idea of how much I’m using as I go.

  3. The cakes look great!!! Way to go, Jane!!!

  4. test post

  5. your comment system does not like me sometimes. It’s probably my network but tasty looking cake. Oh and update your link to my page.

  6. Link updated!

    I didn’t have the right RSS feed in my reader, so I didn’t know you were updating again. Good thing my blog finally let you leave a comment. :) -j.

  7. hooray!

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