ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

So I’ve made the executive decision to use a cake mix for my friends’ wedding cake.  This means that either I am a jerk who doesn’t think they deserve the best handmade from-scratch cake I can crank out, or that with only a few weeks to go, I’m simply scared to try to find a from-scratch recipe that will suit their taste and bake up okay with no weird issues.  I kind of prefer the second interpretation.  I don’t really think I am an experienced enough baker to attempt a project this big without some kind of safety net.  There’s a good chance that if I did go with a from-scratch recipe, everything would turn out fine and we’d be happy with the results, but if things did go wrong, well, frankly it just chills me to think of it.

Also, cake-mix was good enough for a lot of the stuff I served at my own wedding last month, and everybody raved about those desserts.  So I’m thinking, I should probably swallow my pride, hide the Duncan Hines box in the trash to soothe the shame I feel when I look at it, and concentrate on figuring out how I am going to decorate this thing. Making one big fancy cake is exciting, but it’s also a lot different than making a huge smorgasbord of desserts for people to choose from - if one of those small desserts fails, you have a lot to fall back on, but if all your efforts are going into one thing, it seems wise to take all the precautions you can.

And hey.  I used organic eggs.

Maybe one day I’ll be up to the challenge of baking a large special occasion cake from scratch, but for right now I literally have never done any “real” decorating.  I’m excited to learn, but I’m thinking baby steps are key.  And the groom responded to my e-mail about the cake by saying:

As for the cake itself, all [the bride] wants is something with colors that match our decorations.  It doesn’t need to be very elaborate at all, and definitely doesn’t need to be stacked presents, she just wants like 3 square cakes on top of each other kind of offset with minimal decoration that matches our decor.  I think that’s what she has in mind, anyway.  Here is a perfect example of what we want:

Don’t stress too much about it, we aren’t looking for a work of art.

I clicked that link expecting to see a picture of a tiered wedding cake.  Instead, I saw the most glorious Tom Selleck icing art of all time.  I found it truly inspiring - that’s my kind of cake art.  But yes, I got the point, which was: don’t take this thing so seriously.

However, I’m getting excited about this project and now that I’m caught up in the planning aspects of it, I am finding it kind of fun.  I’m sort of considering taking the Wilton cake decorating class even if I can’t use it for their wedding.  I’m thinking I’ll probably be making a lot of excuses to bake after this so that I can practice making stuff look fancy.

I picked up a box of mix and did a “proof-of-concept” trial today using the smallest cake pans I have, so that I can practice assembling and decorating something small that they can taste and see if it reasonably meets their expectations.  So one box of mix got me about 6 cups of batter, which filled two 6×2 inch square pans and two 4.5×1.5 inch round cake pans (needed to use up the extra batter and I figured i might be able to incorporate them somehow).

I mean, a tiny round cake could be a present just as much as a little square cake could, right?  I read every single comment on the first wedding cake post on Smitten Kitchen and learned that apparently if you bake the cakes at only 300 degrees, they don’t dome up as much and then you won’t have to level as much off and more of the baked cake actually goes into the finished product.

I filled the two layers of the six inch cake with the cream cheese icing, but for the little baby layers I decided to fill them with strawberry jam, because I had read recently that the way to do this is to pipe a dam of icing around the edges of the first layer and then to fill that with jam.  However, on the tasting the bride thought it was a bit too cloying, so we aren’t going with that.

Doing the crumb coating was harder than I thought.

I made a few mistakes on this try.  First, the cream cheese icing did not hold up well at room temperature.  It got really goopy and the crumb coating I attempted did not set up when I left it out in the air.  I had to put it in the fridge to get it to solidify at all.  Then I made the mistake of not putting the rest of the icing in the fridge, so when I tried to finish the sides and then use up the rest of the icing by piping designs on the cake itself, it wasn’t stiff enough to really work with anymore. However.  It was highly delicious.

The finished product was very awkward and homemade looking, and I had to keep reminding myself that a) this was my first try ever, and b) this was my first try ever.

The bride was not as disappointed as I expected her to be, although we both wanted the ultimate cake to be much smoother and cleaner than this. So now the challenge is to figure out which icing will be best.  We’ve narrowed it down to four options, which I’ll work up little test versions of next week when we come back from our weekend visit to my father-in-law’s house.  Marshmallow fondant, meringue buttercream, plain old classic buttercream with some shortening in it to help the cake hold up in warmer temperatures, or royal icing.  I forgot to tell them about royal icing, but it’s one of the classics.

So I’ll make these little cakes with the sample icings and do some color experimentation (she wants fuschia and black, best case scenario, but if it doesn’t work out, plain white monochrome).  Then we’ll cope with the rest from there.  Four weeks until the wedding.