Five months' worth of cake!

Since September I've gotten a new job and made a lot of cake. Some of it was photographed and some of it wasn't, because I need to get better about that. New job and lots more coworkers means I'm making more birthday cakes--not a bad thing at all. I'm looking for an occasion to use my new 4-inch cake pans, by the way, so if anyone needs the world's tiniest cake...?

A quick retrospective:

August: Scott's birthday cake! Vanilla cake, bourbon vanilla frosting and Whoppers. Photos by his lovely wife Cait (you all remember Cait, right?)

October: Jenna and Zach's wedding cake! Layers included s'mores (graham cake, marshmallow and chocolate ganache filling), sweet potato and ginger with marshmallow filling, and salted caramel. 

December: My coworker Dolores' birthday cake. She, like most of my new coworkers, loves Reeses Cups, so this is a chocolate cake with peanut butter filling, vanilla frosting and teeeeeny tiny peanut butter cups on top of more peanut butter dollops on top. She took these pictures and then we demolished the cake for breakfast.

And at the end of January I made the prettiest cake ever and I TOOK NO PICTURES. It was for my coworker Katheran's Golden Birthday, also known as a champagne birthday or star birthday (31 on the 31st, in her case). With that in mind, I made her a three-layer champagne cake with vanilla buttercream filling and frosting, studded with gold sugar pearls and little edible gold stars on top. Why I failed to take a picture of this, I will never know. Trust me, it was pretty--and pretty tasty, as long as you weren't a five-year-old. They weren't crazy about the champagne taste. (Maybe someday, little ones.)

Anniversaries: A Cake Philosophy

Basically this whole saving the top tier of your wedding cake nonsense is bull.  Yes, cake can keep well in the freezer--but for a few weeks, people, not 12 months.  You'll thaw it out, have a couple bites, go eugh, and then throw it away.  WASTE OF CAKE AND MONEY.

NO MORE.

For Leah and John's wedding, I told them that we should eat all the cake (we did our best) and I'd make them another one when their anniversary rolled around.  John requested sprinkles, Leah requested lemon, so in the spirit of marriage and compromise I made them one with both.

Admire my gorgeous cake plate, ignore my dirty coffee table.

They were lovely and shared it with us--because let's be real, top tiers of cakes still feed a handful of people, it's a lot to eat by yourself.

So stop freezing your top tiers, people!  Spread the gospel: fresh cake tastes better.

May Birthdays, Part 1

Because life is busy and crazy and we are flexible people, we're doing two May birthdays backwards.  Cait's birthday, which is Monday, gets a cake this weekend, and Leah's birthday, which was last weekend, will get a cake at some later date.  People tend not to complain as long as celebrations are involved.

Cait requested a cake along the lines of John's epic sprinkle groom's cake, the leftovers of which ended up living at her house after the wedding.  As I still have sprinkles leftover from that whole undertaking, I was happy to oblige.

This is what I ended up with!  I forgot until the cake was already on the board that rolling a sprinkle cake requires a board the same size as the cake (in this case, a 6" board--this is on an 8") so I improvised and ended up with something still happy and colorful, with sprinkles inside and out.  The green things are Sixlets and the little colorful dots in the piped spots around the side of the cake are individual sprinkles stabbed in there.  The inside is funfetti cake with a healthy layer of vanilla frosting and sprinkles between the layers.  Happy Birthday, Cait!

edit: Cait is a much better photographer than I am and took some pictures of the cake on their lovely picnic table.  Here it is, looking much nicer: 

I like this picnic table's style.

You can see more of Cait and her husband's house projects, adorable dogs, and other fun things over at My Old Kentucky House.

Spring Cake on a Whim

So here's how things go with me.

I see something--in this case, Sprinkle Bakes' really lovely Speckled Egg Malted Milk Cake:

Complete with phyllo nest.  Fancy!

...and I have to make it.  The cake is a play off malted milk eggs, which as it turns out are HELLA DIFFICULT to locate two days before Easter.  Learn from my mistakes, kids.

Observe: our cake template.  Someday I'll figure out how to cover a cake in a crunchy candy shell.

Didn't have an occasion handy for making such a thing, and it's a lot weirder to bring an entire huge cake to the office than it is a plate of cookies or something, so I offered it up to Claire's family for their Easter get-together.  They accepted, and then her mom invited me to come along with the cake.  Can't say no to that.

I ended up malt-ing Smitten Kitchen's vanilla buttermilk cake recipe (my go-to) via a half cup of malted milk powder, which is pretty handy stuff.  Had to get some chocolate in there somewhere so I used a thin layer of ganache between the layers instead of frosting.  

Obviously, the best part of making this thing is speckling it--you make a paint with vanilla and cocoa and flick it onto your cake with a brush.  Since I figured this would make a huge mess I made a splatter zone with a beach towel, a hammer, and a couple nails.

I think it worked--I haven't found any spots on the wall.  Yet.

I want to do this to every cake I make, it's so much fun in a way that only terribly messy things can be.  Final result?

Obviously I had to stick a bunch of candy in this thing, you know me.

This ended up being a pretty sizable cake--three 8" layers plus frosting and filling.  Obviously this falls into the category of non-problems, but I'm going to need to source some bigger cake boxes.

Other cakes of 2013

Bridal shower cake for a White Shower for Melissa, made in collaboration with our friend Claire, who delivered and assembled it like a badass.

Lemon cake, lemon curd, vanilla buttercream.

(Flower and ribbon both 100% inedible, please do not eat.)

Giant Little Debbie cake for my dad for Father's Day. 

Chocolate cake, meringue filling (mysteriously disappeared, whoops), chocolate frosting, ganache, white chocolate swirl.

(As you can see, stuck to the sides of the box like crazy, for maximum Little Debbie-esque realness.)

Birthday cake for Lauren, with orbiting satellite cupcakes.

Chocolate Octoberfest cake with brown sugar buttercream, candied pecans, and sprinkles.

Birthday cake for my brother.

Three layers of spicy carrot cake with cream cheese frosting and hand-picked red sprinkles from my large collection of multi-colored sprinkles.

Cake for my mom's surprise birthday party.

Vanilla buttermilk cake with malted vanilla buttercream and Whoppers.  Frosting was tinted a totally uncooperative shade of purple which refused to photograph correctly, but the cake (and the party) were both pretty good.

Wedding Cake 3: Leah and John

When the girl you've known since you were 8 tells you she's getting married, of course you offer to make her cake.  Duh.  This was my last wedding of the summer and I was in it and baking for it and that was quite the day.

150-ish guests meant I had a pretty good chance of feeding everyone without resorting to the (totally valid) sheet cake method, and I could let the bride and groom choose their own flavors for their own cakes--two households, both alike in dignity, yada yada yada.  As you can imagine, this led to a vast number of flavors for testing.

(This is not all of them.  This is some.  Thankfully it was also Leah's mom's birthday so I sent some home with them.)

We ended up with two very different, very lovely cakes, which I will now describe for you as they are inscribed on my memory until the end of time.

John's cake:

Bottom and top tiers: funfetti cake, filled with vanilla funfetti frosting, covered in vanilla buttercream, and rolled in sprinkles.  WITH SIXLETS AROUND THE EDGES, because we needed more color.

Middle tier: lemon cake, vanilla buttercream filling and frosting, with funfetti piping around the base.

Leah's cake:

Bottom and middle tiers: Lemon cake, raspberry filling, raspberry buttercream frosting.

Top tier: Chocolate cake, raspberry filling, raspberry buttercream frosting.

(Guess which one is which)

I'm making another sprinkle cake this summer so I'll take you through the process then, but suffice to say it involves buying pounds of sprinkles and having the courage/stupidity to pick your (beautifully baked, beautifully frosted, perfectly smooth) cake up, turn it sideways, and plop it down in a pan.  It also involves a lot of profanity.  Stay tuned.

Photo by Jarron at Dei Gratia Photography, who was nice enough to take lots of cake pictures mostly for my benefit.

Wedding Cake 2: Haley and Seth

Haley and Seth are beautiful humans who had a dessert bar at their wedding that they let me contribute to--by which I mean that I needed to practice covering a cake in sprinkles and they indulged me.  Even though I just made a bitty cake that only had to get to Bowling Green, it managed to completely slide off its base in transit and ended up looking less pretty than it should have.  Thankfully nobody was paying attention because there was so much other great stuff going on, and I cunningly used neon-colored candy and sprinkles on the cake itself to distract from any imperfections.

(Lemon cake with ginger bourbon peach buttercream, rolled in sprinkles and topped with jellybeans, because we're all adults here.)

It is important that you note that the dessert bar banners said TREAT YOSELF.  This is vital.

Photo by the amazingly talented Carrie and Ganer of Sur La Lune Photography