Layer Cake

Today, in honor of Rob's birthday, I decorated the first real birthday cake I've made in many years.

There was a time when I wanted to be a pastry chef, and so apprenticed myself to a bakery.  There I learned to decorate cakes, and found a talent that I love to use.  I can't draw to save my life, but man alive can I do it up with frosting!  :-)  Even today, I enjoy the occasional fantasy of having a home cake business.  The truth is, though, that I did not pursue the craft professionally because I found that I much prefer to bake for friends and family than for strangers/customers.  Rob had never been on the receiving end of a bakery-style homemade cake (i.e. complete with roses, writing, etc.) and seemed a bit intrigued that it could be done at home.  So he sat down and watched the process.  You can too!

Yesterday I baked the cakes.  It is very helpful to make the cakes you wish to frost at least a day ahead, then wrap well and put in the freezer.  This helps prevent the crumb from coming off in the frosting, and also makes it a nice, firm surface upon which to spread the frosting.  Here you see the tools I gathered for the frost-o-rama: 

(left to right:   doily on top of cardboard round, angled frosting knife, straight frosting knife, four frosting tips (petal, star, circle and leaf), two coupling parts, two bags to hold the frosting) and the big white thing in the middle is my turn table)

I was working with 9" round cakes (well, actually two rounds and one square, the corners of which I cut off because I only have two round pans) so I used a 10" cardboard round.  I stick a 10" doily to the cardboard with a small dollop of frosting, then put another dollop onto the doily and the first layer of cake goes on top of that dollop.  I pile on a couple of good-sized mounds of buttercream frosting and spread it to an even level.  On goes the second layer, plus more frosting, then the third layer, which is the stage you see here:

I made cake with spelt flour instead of wheat, and one of the results of this substitution is that the cakes are denser than they would be with wheat.  We don't mind that at all, and I found that the fact that the cakes didn't dome up in the middle saved me the (rather annoying) step of having to level the tops of each layer...which vastly increases the likelihood of crumb-strewn frosting.

A word on frosting:  I made a standard buttercream frosting, which I tripled.  The recipe, which calls for one stick of butter, 1/3 cup of milk, 2 tsp vanilla and 6.5 cups of powdered sugar, claims to be enough to frost a two-layer cake or one small rectangle cake.  Ha!  In fact, double ha!  Those quantities would have produced enough to barely cover a rectangle, I think, with a skimpy layer of buttercream.  Since I had three (albeit thin) layers to frost, and planned on really decorating it, I was glad that I had tripled the quantities.  In truth, I could have gotten by with a double batch, but I'll use the leftovers for cookies tomorrow or later this week, so it all works out in the end.  The point is, it's better to make too much frosting (which, in this project, is your artistic medium, after all!) and have leftovers than to realize part way through that you don't have enough to make the cake tasty and pretty.

So, back to the cake.  The next step is to frost the top and the sides with their *initial* layer of frosting (it'll end up with two coats).  Think of this layer as the primer you use on walls before painting.  Its job is to smooth out the surface, fill in gaps/holes and make it easier to put on the next coat.  You may have noticed in the picture above that the middle layer is the square cake I cut round.  It didn't end up exactly the same size as the round cakes, so this first layer of frosting will help fill in those discrepancies.

Clearly, this cake is not ready to present to anyone for their birthday.  It is, however, ready to be decorated!  I continue to focus my efforts on the sides, to which I add more frosting in narrow, vertical sections with the straight frosting knife, smoothing as I go.  After the whole circumference has received it's second coat, then with one hand I steadily hold the edge of the knife to the side of the cake while slowly turning the cake table with the other.  In this manner, I smooth out the sides.  Then it's a pretty simple matter to make the top smooth, using the angled knife to gently even and smooth the frosting on the top.  The edges of the top will be ragged-looking, which isn't a great surface for the decorations, so I gently make the frosting that's sticking up from the side press down and lie flat upon the top.

The bakery cakes of Rob's youth were always yellow cake with yellow roses on top, so I turned the rest of the buttercream yellow using a natural, turmeric-based food coloring.  It made a lovely shade of soft yellow.  Back in the bakery, we used paste food coloring, which is great because it doesn't affect the consistency of the frosting the way liquid coloring does.  That stuff is full of scary artificial colors, though, so we opted to experiment with food-based coloring instead.  I had my package of powdered sugar handy in case I needed to make the frosting thicker after adding the turmeric goo.  As it turned out, it wasn't until I got to the roses that I decided I would have liked a slightly harder frosting, but by then it wasn't worth the effort to adjust, so the roses are a bit blobby.  Blobby, but tasty (absolutely NO turmeric flavor, in case you were wondering)!

So with the yellow frosting I did the bottom trim and the writing.  Back in the day, especially when I was first learning to do script with frosting, or for very important cakes (like the Marine Corps Birthday Cake I did - it had lots of teeny writing on it), I would use a toothpick to just barely etch the lettering into the frosting.  Then I'd go over it with the actual frosting.  For this cake, I did it freehand:

I like to get the whole top decorated, flowers and all, before putting the trim on it.  Otherwise I'm likely to drag a sleeve edge over it, or something equally disastrous!  I spooned out a large dollop of frosting into a separate bowl so that I could turn it green for leaves and stems.  For this purpose, I had some blue natural food coloring, made from blueberries.  While it smelled delicious, it didn't exactly make the yellow frosting green - or blue, for that matter.  It was more purple than blue, which turned the yellow stuff a sickly grey.  Sigh.  Rob and I commiserated, and found the greenest food-product we have in our home:  a capsule of Spirulina!  I opened it up and dumped the powdered algae into the bowl.  The color in the photos isn't exact, but here's the before and after:

So, that rather weird green became stems, upon which the yellow roses grow.  Then back to green for leaves (here I would have preferred MUCH thicker frosting, as well as new leaf tips, but I did my best with what I had):

Once the flowers and leaves were done, I added the top trim, and that was that!  Not bad for the first cake I've decorated in years, eh?  :-)

It is, of course, a bit time-consuming to decorate a cake to this degree at home, but it'll taste a million times better than grocery-store cake (ugh!  that nasty frosting!) or box cake, for that matter.  For me, decorating a cake is a wonderful opportunity to use my creative juices in a way I don't often do.  I feel blessed for the reminder of how very much I enjoy baking and cake-decorating.  It isn't how I'd want to spend 10 hours a day, but for the occasional Saturday it's a swell way to spend my time!

Comments

[Diane]

Kelly! Wow, this is really amazing! I'm inspired... now if I only had a kitchen... :) You rock in so many ways.

[Inger]

Kelly, you never cease to amaze me with your myriad talents, interests and experience! So glad to have met you!

[Benito]

Children's birthday cake decoration must have a good design, shape, and size. If the cake has any theme or idea, the children will love it. If the design resembles a familiar character to the children like noddy, it will be an added attraction while making a cake decoration

[Lynn]

I made a gorgeous icing tonight to decorate christmas tree cookies tonight. I made the most beautiful shade of green with mashed avocado, a tsp of vances dairi free, and some icing sugar. I also made some reddish pink icing by using pomegranate juice which i squeezed from fresh pomegranate. now if i could just learn how to color sugar with natural sources.

[Lynn]

I made a gorgeous icing tonight to decorate christmas tree cookies tonight. I made the most beautiful shade of green with mashed avocado, a tsp of vances dairi free, and some icing sugar. I also made some reddish pink icing by using pomegranate juice which i squeezed from fresh pomegranate. now if i could just learn how to color sugar with natural sources.