My best work

About this time last year (or was it two years ago? They all seem to run together these days!) I did a wedding cake for a dear friend. I had never made a cake for anyone before so I think it was sheer confidence that prompted me to offer to make her cake. I watched Ace of Cakes enough and I knew I could figure it out. She sent me pictures of a couple ideas she had for cakes and they all looked so easy, so I told her I could do it!

For anyone who hasn't tried to do a professional-looking cake, I recommend you try it. It really is NOT as hard as it looks!

I baked the cakes a couple days before the wedding and froze them. I heard that you can freeze them and then brush the crumbs off while it is still very cold and that is supposed to help the frosting to remain crumb-free. Well, that didn't work well for me. But that is why you see a brush in the picture below. You'll also notice that one of the cakes had a big piece that broke off, but that's nothing that frosting can't hold together! Frosting makes a great glue! :)



The bride didn't want to use fondant since no one really likes the taste, so I told her we could do buttercream. I searched the internet and found the "paper-towel method" for smoothing buttercream to look like fondant, so that's what I did. I definitely recommend this method! It seems like everyone prefers buttercream and you really can get it to look smooth. The cake below was a bit frozen, so the buttercream was too hard to smooth properly. But I knew it would be mostly covered up, so it worked.



This layer wasn't frozen, so the buttercream smoothed a little better.



One key ingredient that really helps is a mom that is willing to help you when it's past midnight and you're about to break down in tears from sheer exhaustion. Moms are good for stuff like that. :)



Here it is in the assembling stages. I started to worry that it wouldn't look nice at this point. But... as you'll see, frosting covers a multitude of sins.



Here are the layers after all the dots and embellishment was added. Looks like it might actually be presentable!



Here I am at 3 a.m. with the almost-finished product. Time for sleep! The flowers would be added the next day right before the ceremony.



It was really hot that day, and I was obviously inexperienced about what to do when it's really hot, so I spent the whole morning freaking out about the buttercream melting and sliding into a large heap of frosting on the cake table. Thankfully that didn't happen, but I did have to do some re-smoothing at the church!



Finished product! It was a success! Everyone loved it and I can't tell you how many people asked me for my cake recipe. Can you say Betty Crocker? ;)