THE INSIDE OF THE CAKE

It's pretty!!!

Happy Valentine's Day everyone!



Even Ella liked it. :)


Thanks to Amanda the fabulous creator of this cake.

Read below about the process I went through making this - and all the pictures!

THE CAKE

Okay. It's done. It's been a crazy day but it's done.

And..... here it is.

I would like to first thank my mom and Grant because this cake would not have happened without their help. Mom for the 100 phone calls I placed to her while making it and Grant for keeping Ella happy and also helping me figure out how much milk I dumped in the icing when I realized that I put more than I was suppose to in.

So. First things first. Going to the store. It took 2 trips.

Here are all of the ingredients I needed in addition to all of of the baking stuff I already have. This shocked me since I feel like I keep a lot of baking things on hand.

I had to go back to the store because after some research (and a phone call to mom) I discovered that Cake Flour is different than all-purpose. Luckily mom told me to look for a box and sure enough - there it was!

The importance of color....I had to buy CLEAR vanilla extract to make white icing and cake, and a giant bottle of red food coloring because well, I was making a red cake and the small tube I had of food coloring would not have cut it.

I wanted to include a picture of my mixer because Grant actually bought this for me as a Valentine's gift when we were dating. Nice gift huh. :)

So I started. Now. I'd like to put in a little background here. I like to bake. I LIKE to bake. That doesn't mean I'm always good at it nor have I pushed the limits of what I can do. Today that all changed. I've never actually made a cake from scratch before. I've always only altered cake mix recipes. So for me, the hardest thing for this whole project was making the cakes.

First Cake - Red Velvet

I started at 9 am on this sucker and I finished at 10:30 - meaning I put it in the oven after an hour and a half of mixing. I didn't have any problems, it was just complex and I didn't want to mess it up so I often read and reread the instructions before I did anything. Plus the creator of this cake altered her recipes and her notes were above the recipe so I had to read the recipe and then go back up and figure out if she changed anything for that ingredient. I put it in the oven and called mom (this happens a lot by the way...calling mom). I told her that it really filled up the pan. I guess my 9x13 is shallow compared to the pan that the lady used because when I opened up the oven I saw that it had overflowed and I had a mound of red velvet at the bottom of my oven. A great way to start the project!

Disaster #1 Red Velvet overflowing...too much batter.

Luckily the cake still cooked fine and since all I was going to do with this cake was crumble it, it was fine. And the pile of cake at the bottom of the stove came up easily.

So as I took this cake out I had the white cake mixed. This was a lot easier to make than the red velvet and I was feeling pretty good about it. I greased and floured 4 round pans and started to put the batter in them and quickly realized I didn't have enough batter.

Disaster #2 Not enough White Cake batter!

So I tried to put them in 4 pans but there wasn't enough so I dumped them into 2 and threw 2 in the oven and called mom. "Mom, this batter was only enough for 2-9 inch pans" Mom "well that sounds right - most cake mixes are for 2 round pans". Great. I had to make a whole other cake. I only had enough butter for what I was planning on but I had a couple of sticks of salted butter I could use for the icing so this was the plan. Mom called me back. "I was looking at the photos on the tutorial and those cakes look small. I think she just used 1 recipe for all 4". I didn't know how they would be enough but I quickly pulled the cakes out of the oven, cleaned out the 2 pans that had batter scraped out of them, greased again, flowered again and dumped a little bit of batter into both. In the 4 cakes went. It wasn't until they were baking did mom figure it out. "You are using 8 inch pans right?"

Hmm...no. I had 9 inch pans.

Disaster #3-9 inch pans should be 8 inch pans.

So these didn't take long to cook since they were so shallow so after I took them out I took a shower and a little break.

After my break I made the icing. I had bought enough ingredients to double the recipe since it said it was only enough for a 2 layer cake. Plus I thought icing is what will cover up my mistakes. I didn't know if I would need that much so I thought I would make 1.5 recipes. So I threw in 3 sticks of butter and had calculated that I needed 3/4 cup of milk. I added the milk and was adding the powdered sugar when I thought "boy this seems soupy". I stood there staring at the measuring cup and thought, I don't remember measuring 3/4. Did I accidentally put in 1 whole cup? I mentioned to Grant what I had done and he had a brilliant idea. "Did you wash the measuring cup before you used it again?" yes. "Then look for a residue on it at the cup mark". Sure enough we held it up to the light and there was a white ring right at the 1 cup mark.
So in went another stick of butter and some more vanilla.

Disaster #4 Measure Correctly!


Then the building started. I actually enjoyed this part more than mixing the cakes up. I got out the cake plates that I wanted to use and got one cake ready to flip out of the pan and...no flippin. It was stuck. STUCK. I had to use a fork around the whole thing to get it out. This ended up happening to all 4 pans! I'm not sure why, but all of them stuck even though I greased and floured them.

Disaster #5 Cakes Stuck

So I build 2-2 cake high cakes and put them in the freezer for an hour or so. Then took them out and started carving. Grant helped me build the "compass" to have a nice circle and this was by far the easiest and the funnest part of the cake. I guess I'm more of a sculptor than a chemist! I was also surprised at this point how much cake I was going to throw away. I literally carved half of the cakes out of these things, ate a few bites and thew the scraps away. Oh well.


Then I added the crumbled red velvet mixed with icing. This was very pretty and these crumbs were yummy!










Then I flipped the top half to sit on the bottom half...well I tried to at least. I flipped the plate but nothing was coming. I turned it back and did some research and guess what...the cake was stuck to the plate! And it was breaking. Great.

Disaster #6 Cake Stuck

I separated the cake from the plate the best I could and did some repair work with icing.





So at this point my cake is done other than icing but boy it's not pretty. I didn't level the cakes and with the top cake breaking my cake is slightly bigger at the top than the bottom. I iced as good as I could (I'm not good at icing) and then sprinkled the crumbs on. I really wish I knew how to ice a cake well. I love how the lady does it in the tutorial. It's so clean and smooth. I'm going to have to learn how to do this because after all that work I want it to be pretty on the outside.

At least the crumbs are pretty. :)



It took a while to clean up and then I relaxed the rest of the day. I finished it at 4 pm so it was a long cake making experience.

Here's the kitchen when I was done.



We are looking forward to cutting into it tomorrow. I don't anticipate a perfect heart since I had shallow cakes and lots of disasters. But since I ate the scraps I can honestly say that this cake will taste good. :)

Things I would do differently if I made this again:
- buy 8" cakes pans
- use 2 pans for the red velvet so it doesn't overflow
- put wax paper in the bottom of the pans and while I'm working on them
- buy a cake leveler
- buy an icing spatula and learn how to use it

That's it folks. I'll post pictures of the inside in another post.

Doing the Cake

I've decided to do this cake and I'm crazy enough to even make the white cake from scratch.

She says you can do that part with a mix but I've never been a fan of white cake from a mix so I'm going for it.

I'm getting the stuff today and plan on making it Saturday. I've read through the tutorial and recipes a few times so I feel pretty good about it.

I'll take pictures throughout the process and post about it hopefully Sunday.

We'll see how it goes!

Maybe Not...

So I just read the recipe for the below Heart Cake and she actually doesn't tell you how to make it, just the recipe for the cake and icing.  Plus the more I look at this the more I think this is out of my league.  

BUT, I do plan on making the red velvet part of this with the white icing and crumbles on top.  I may even try to take gorgeous pictures of it like this person did.  I may share those with you as well, but you won't see that beautiful heart in it.  :(

I bet I can do a heart on the top with the crumbles....

I want to try

To make this Heart Cake.

I really love to bake, I can do without cooking but baking just makes me happy.  Maybe that's because the batter is yummy and I like sweets.  :)

I'll let you know how it goes.

Now for an update.  We survived the show and our house is (almost) back to normal.  We still have a booth in the garage but will for at least 20 more days.  Ella seems to be feeling better but it's hard to tell about her ears.  She grabs them now when she's tired, hungry, or upset so it's hard for me to know whether they hurt or not.  I may take her in again just to make sure they are okay...we'll see.  But she's over her cold and acting a lot better but still not sleeping all night yet.  The last 2 nights we've had middle of the night feedings and that's unusual for her. I think she may be going through a growth spurt because I swear I fed her 10 times yesterday!

About 3 days ago she discovered that things that are not her toys are more interesting.  She was playing nicely at her gym thing and the next thing I know she's pulling on the curtains.  Then she was on the couch next to me playing and then I notice she's doing a back bend trying to reach the lamp...and so on.  She's not crawling yet, not rolling, but I think all of that will come soon because she wants to be in places other than where I set her down.  It's going to be an interesting month!

That's all for now folks!