My First Custom Cake...

As many of you know, I am attempting to make custom cakes, and since Doug and Sarah asked me to make their wedding cake, I can use all the practice I can get!

Last week a friend of mine asked me to make a cake for a Baby Shower. I did a bunch of browsing to find cakes that I thought I could feasibly do and got to planning. I planned and planned and got it all ready. I made fondant baby clothes to go on the side of the cake, I made fondant buttons to line the layers, fondant flowers to go on the sides, and I bought little baby shoes to go on top. Here is the saga of the first attempt!
I made a practice cake on Wednesday to make sure that the cake was a good sturdy recipe for the cake I planned to make. It was a delicious cake and it was PERFECT! Easy to make, easy to stack, easy to frost. A cake decorator's DREAM! I made a few sketches and decided on my design and I made all of the fondant on that Wednesday. My friend, Cassie, who has made a million cakes like this in the past, told me I should make the cakes on Thursday and keep them refrigerated so that all I had to do on Friday was decorate them. Well... I thought about it and decided to make them on Friday instead. It doesn't take that long to make a cake, right? Well, that's true... in theory!

I had originally decided on a 7" two-layer cake on the top tier and a 9" two-layer cake on the bottom tier. My first batch of cake (Friday morning, 1 day until pickup) looked a little speckled after I added the melted chocolate. Confused, I called Cassie. How did I screw up her recipe!? She said it would probably be fine and the shards of chocolate would melt when it cooks, but I just threw out the recipe and started over. The second, third and 4th batches all went well. That's right.

You see, the 7 and 9 inch cakes look funny proportionately so I decided on a 12" round bottom and a 9" round top (despite Cassie's insistence that the two other sizes would be more than enough to feed 15 people). I had to make 2 extra cake recipes to accommodate the 12" layers. The first cake, didn't come out of the pan right, so it was a mountain of a mess and it would have taken SURGERY to fix it. I just made another one. The next two 12" layers came out fine. Then it was time to frost the cakes, stack them and decorate them.
I was going to put in a strawberry cream cheese filling, but it didn't set up, so it was just like soup. I decided on buttercream frosting instead. grr. I frosted the cakes (dirty coat) and put them in the freezer, took them out, frosted them again (final coat), put them BACK in the freezer and then added the fondant and icing decorations. In the middle of this frosting I had to attend a baby shower, so the cakes were in the freezer for a couple of hours. :) It only took me 30 minutes to decorate the cakes.In the middle of all of this, Andrea called me and asked me to make just one more cake by the next day... a sheet cake for a birthday party. No problem. It was about a 45 minute job, including baking the cake. Thank goodness for left over cake that could be made into truffles!

After 11 LONG hours and 3 trips to the store to replenish a supply of something I ran out of, I finished the cake at 11:00 pm. Andrea came to pick up the cake the next morning. It was SO fun, but I wish that I had baked the cakes on Thursday like Cassie had said! I have to admit, the cake was MUCH bigger than it needed to be, and they had WAY too much left over (The entire bottom tier, too much)! But it was fun and quite a learning experience! I'll definitely bake the cakes BEFORE decorating day! Total time for decorating day could have been as little as 3 hours! Now I know for next time!