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.