Countdown: One more Month and Many Lessons Learned

Made a cake for Joe and Amy's wedding shower. The wedding is SO SOON!!! I'm excited for a number of reasons. Mainly because I love both of them, and also because this will be my first wedding cake. To celebrate their upcoming wedding, I made this the flavor of Amy's second choice, the one we ended up not using for the wedding... though I hope she didn't regret that too much after how amazing this cake tasted. This cake was lemon pound cake with lemon curd filling and swiss meringue buttercream frosting. The flowers are fondant colored with gel food coloring and dusted with pearl dust. The inspiration for the flavors came from Martha Stewart Weddings: http://www.marthastewartweddings.com/photogallery/coconut-wedding-cakes#slide_3 with some slight changes.

I followed her cake recipe and it came out phenomenally. I have found my standard lemon pound cake recipe!! I could have eaten the entire thing myself. It was very dense and moist just like a pound cake should be. Note: the measurements on the link are four 3 inch pans, whereas most people use 2 inch pans. I had to guess at how much to make, and I think I was a little short. Especially because of the density of this cake, use more than you think you need. A great resource for how much batter is needed in various sized pans can be found here: http://www.wilton.com/cakes/making-cakes/baking-wedding-cake-2-inch-pans.cfm.

The lemon curd recipe listed looked a little goofy (and called for 18 eggs) so I ended up using the lemon curd recipe from Joy of Baking: http://www.joyofbaking.com/LemonCurd.html and I'm glad I did. I hadn't ever had lemon curd, but I will use this recipe again and again. I trippled the recipe which was perfect for this two tiered cake (each tier is two layers, each layer torted).

The frosting was my special standard swiss meringue buttercream and while I won't give up that recipe, I will say this cake is great with swiss meringue buttercream- and the Martha Stewart link gives a pretty good recipe. I didn't try coconut flavor, but I can see it going well with this cake.

Lessons learned:
1.) Lemon curd doesn't ever thicken up all that much. While as a general rule I wouldn't start using dowel supports until a cake is three tiered, next time I use lemon curd in a two tiered cake, I will definitely use support rods. I spent an entire day patching leaks of lemon curd pouring out of the bottom tier as it wasn't strong enough to support the weight of the top tier. Great lesson to learn on a cake that I had time to fix. I got lucky that I wasn't making it too last minute.
2.) I tried one of those "food coloring spray paint" cans from Michaels and it lasted literally five seconds of spraying before it ran out. I was really dissapointed at having wasted $5. Don't buy those!!! I still haven't found a great solution for making things silver, but for the time being, I'll stick with painting flowers with pearl dust.

All around, I'm really pleased. I learned a lot and it was so fun to surprise her with this cake at the wedding shower!

Banana BONANZA

I love banana bread with chocolate chips or nutella or anything chocolate, so for this cake I tried something new and it turned out great! This is a banana cake filled with the chocolate glaze-like frosting listed in the recipe below. I chose to frost it in a traditional chocolate buttercream, because while the chocolate glaze tasted great, and worked well as a filling, it would not have held up well for frosting this kind of cake. It would work great for a bundt cake or other cake it could be poured over.
My lilacs can use a little work, but I think this turned out beautifully.
The recipe came again from one of my favorite baking blogs. Please visit and click around her blog if you like baking, it's phenomenal. Recipe: http://lickthebowlgood.blogspot.com/2010/04/going-bananas.html

Momma M. celebrating 89 years!!

Happy Easter!

For this Easter Cake, I experimented a little with fondant Cala Lilies. Wilton makes an excellent tool (creativly called a cala lily former) that takes the guess work out. Next time I might mix them with buttercream leaves to make them a little more lifelike, but they came out well and very appropriate for an Easter cake.

Yellow Cake filled with Swiss Meringue Buttercream, frosted in Vanilla Buttercream with Fondant accent decorations

**Note: This cake was not smudged when it was delivered. :) I learned a good lesson of TAKING PICTURES of my cakes before handing them over. Photo Credit for this otherwise great picture goes to Charles Musto. Thanks friend!