Red Velvet Wedding Cake

About a month ago I was asked to make a wedding cake under very unusual circumstances. This couple was having a very low-key, non-traditional wedding. They weren't going to have a cake or decorations or family, just a grandparent as a witness and not much else. I work with the groom, and he asked me how much it would cost to get an 8" round red velvet cake for that day. I was excited because, as I mentioned in this post, I had been looking for an excuse to learn to make RVC. (You can get the recipe there as well, which uses beets as dye instead of food coloring.) I was also excited because it was my first wedding cake that I was hired to do. The problem was, I was heading home to New Jersey a week before the wedding.

Well, we happen to work in a grocery store bakery and we know that you can freeze a cake and it's still pretty good.  Like I said, they weren't going to have a cake anyway so this was better than nothing. Then came the next kicker - RVC is his bride's favorite cake. She absolutely loves it - with rainbow chip icing??? Yep, not cream cheese or even regular buttercream but rainbow chip. This was quickly becoming the strangest first-wedding-cake experience ever.

Being the person I am, I wanted to give them a gift as well - so instead of a just an 8" I also made a 6" tier for the top. The day I was leaving for NJ, I delivered this cake to the store where we work. Of course I kept the tiers separate and gave instructions on how to stack it. Unfortunately, it was one of those 100 degree days and the buttercream started to melt. I was hoping someone at the store would be able to fix the border before he took it, but I guess that never panned out. He had to attempt to fix it himself. So here is the picture of the first wedding cake I've made, with an obvious boo-boo. I didn't take the picture. In fact, this is a picture of the picture that the groom brought in afterwards.

It is unfortunate that I wasn't there to stack it properly, fix the icing, etc. You can see the spot with no border, but those two "shells" to the right of it were his attempt and I guess he gave up haha. Like I said, anything was better than no cake. I do wish they had gotten a picture from the good side and I feel bad but he knew that I wasn't going to be there to put it together and the top tier was a gift, not something he was paying for. If you ignore that bit, though, I was really happy with the way it turned out.

Congratulations!

Happy 50th Birthday friends!

At school a couple of great teachers were turning 50. Two months ago I had this awesome surprise party idea, the whole staff involved, and cakes involving black fondant strips and sparklers. Then stuff happened. That's what I call working two jobs, being a DI coach, math remediation, volunteering to help with the choir show and trying to cook dinner at least a couple of times a week. So it sat in the back of my mind but never really came to. Plus I was making small cakes for my Wilton class so that has been a lot of baking this month. But yesterday around 6:30 another teacher asked if we were doing anything for them so I said I'd make something simple, she got flowers and chips and dip (which I originally wrote as "flowers and dip" but that sounds gross) and we had someone else get some soda. On a side note I try really hard not to call soda "pop" but it's really hard down here and a lot of times I think the word soda just doesn't fit in with the atmosphere of our Appalachian (app-uh-LAY-shun) school.

Okay, something simple? Riiiiiiight.

Now, remember we decided to do this at 6:30 - pm! I had just begun my 45 minutes drive home from school and had not really prepared for this. Good thing I always have plenty of cake ingredients and am no longer worried about rushing out to buy boxed mix! So late last night I made the two paisley-shaped cake tiers. I was so excited to buy these 4 months ago and doubly excited to finally stack some! (I had used the smaller one in a Christmas cake - but this was the first time I used them two together. I have three but the bottom one is waaay big.) So, late last night night I was baking these cakes. It's been a long week and I was tired, so I went to bed as soon as they were cool enough to store. That was around 10:30. I got up at 4:30 this morning ready to decorate! I did cheat a little and base iced it using some Pillsbury buttercream I had in the cabinet. It was on closeout and I like to keep some on hand for cake emergencies. I did make my own icing though for the roses and shell border. Luckily purple is the favorite color of BOTH birthday-ees, so that made it super easy. Here's a few views of what it looked like at 6 am:

From the front

From the top

A bit closer up

So of course I wasn't exactly done when I went to school. I originally planned to have sparklers and whatnot, right? So I needed something a bit ridiculous. I decided to make a large 5-0 out of melted white chocolate - a trick I learned from the Hello Cupcake books. Then I had an even better idea - I also covered two small candles with white chocolate and attached them. Edible 5-0 birthday candles! Awesome!! All the time spent was so worth it for our cute little party. 

 Happy Friday!