Layers of Fun

Recently, my friend Liz (an excellent caterer) threw her hands up in despair upon discovering that her 5 year old had pulled a cake for catering off the table an hour before the event. As Liz was explaining this to me, she said, "It's a sign! I'm not supposed to be doing dessert! I just need to have someone else do it for me." Being the baker that I am, I volunteered. Liz, knowing sloppy me as well as she does, said "Yes, but could you do the decorating?"

This is the million dollar question. On more than one occasion I have noted my absolute carelessness in appearance of food, because my goal is solely for it to taste good. Whereas my sister will spend time arranging each leaf and element of a salad on a plate, I simply mix it all together and let people serve themselves. All this to say that Liz brought up a valid point. (My last layer cake decorating event was disastrous, at best.) So, after a moment of thought, I said, "Yes, I think I could do the decorating; I'd just have to take time to practice or maybe even take a class."

Hence, this weekend, I borrowed Liz's cake decorating items and set off to make a cake. Additionally, I had my mentee, Kayla, join me in this adventure since she loves to watch the cake decorating shows on the Food Network. After debating between chocolate cake, caramel cake, or white raspberry cake, we decided on the Raspberry-Laced Vanilla Cake on the back of the cake flour box. It was to be a 3 layer cake, with each layer split in half (to make 6 layers) with frosting and raspberry jam alternating between the layers.

After the cakes had finally cooled (I tried very hard not to cheat on this part-I'm very impatient), we cut off the tops to make them level, and then split each layer in half. This was challenging, but doable. The hard part was moving them from the rack to the cake plate, since some weren't cut particularly evenly, and one of them had been nibbled on by a certain white fluffy dog who shall remain nameless. But, after a bit of maneuvering and a fair amount of crumb-making, we succeeded.The next issue was trying to decide what to do since I had two 8 in. round pans and one 9 in. pan. After a bit of hemming and hawing, we just sliced off the extra inch when all the layers were assembled. (See first picture.)

Next came the frosting. We took our apparent gallons of pink buttercream frosting, and started slathering it on. Then we had to decide how to frost it. We had Liz's cake decorating nozzles, which worked great on a ziploc bag with the corner cut off. However, it took some practicing on various flat surfaces to get the decor to appear marginally presentable. When all was said and done though, I thought it turned out quite well. It's not professional by any stretch of the imagination, but it was definitely presentable. It's still not something I'd do for my own dinners, but for catering, I could probably arrange it :-) Who knows? Maybe there's hope for me, after all!