non-wedding cake #1

I really love baking.  I also really hate it.  It takes up so much time, makes a huge mess, we never seem to have the right ingredients, and I'm entirely too impatient to do anything right (measuring cups? we have a few, but I always default to using the same 1/2 cup and lose count of how many scoops I've added 50% of the time).  Why do I love it?  There is nothing better than making something pretty, delicious, and share-able.  I love baking when things work out.

I'm super interested in making a wedding cake and thought that before I really committed myself to partaking in such a huge endeavor, I should at least try to see if I could make a stacked cake.  One amazing (and uninformed) trip to the cake supply store later, I couldn't help but dive in.  I usually only bake now on the rare occasion that both girls are sleeping at the same time.  That, coupled with the never ending to-do-list that I happily put on hold, force me to bake with a terrible sense of urgency.  Knowing that one or both of the girls will probably wake up and derail me any minute, means I just better get everything done that minute.  And, if you're thinking that probably doesn't help my impatient, messy, not-exact baking style? you're right.  I try to do things all at once, skip steps, or realize I don't have enough of something in the middle of the recipe during most undertakings.  Luckily, I'm building a sense of what works and keep the iPad close to Google away and speed bumps.

This cake didn't take long at all and it wasn't hard.  I learned from some of my mistakes with buttercream, and think that it'll spread smoother next time.  I baked the cakes during naptime, and made frostings and frosted intermittently while we bathed the girls, put them to bed, then brought them back out to play because they weren't sleeping. A total of 4-5 hours of work.  Ellie told me the cake was pretty.  The only way we could convince her not to stick her fingers in it that night was by telling her that we had to wait for Fifi to come over to eat it the next day. 

As promised, Finn came over, and after we added to our set of pictures they'll hate us for later, we all ate some cake.  A rich, dense chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream icing.  Delish.  I brought 1/2 of it to work and we finished the rest within the week :)

And of course, the pictures that Jess took make the cake so much prettier than it really was.  How does she do it???