Cakes, cakes, cakes

Are you guys sick of cakes yet? I hope not because I'm not done with them yet. Today is the due date for Barefoot Bloggers but this is not my Barefoot Bloggers post. The Barefoot Blogger recipe is for a cake. And not for just any cake, it is for a half sheet cake. Well I actually have some stuff going on later this week where I could actually use a sheet cake so I am going to cheat a little and delay my post until then.

To hold you over until then here is another cake I recently made. My wife had a friend at work that recently got married and she wanted to have a party for them. I decided I could make the cake. There is a lot of pressure when you are making a cake from someone else and I was a little nervous about this one. For one thing my wife told me that Mohamed has a lot of friends so there would be somewhere between 50-100 people. Every site I found seems to have a different guideline to how much cake I needed for that many people. I decided to make a two layer half sheet which is my biggest cake yet. I was a little worried with how hard it would be to work with a cake of this size.

Mohamed and Gianna said they wanted a marble cake and the colors were purple and silver. I decided to do a cake similar to one in my fondant class that I liked. It used a lot of gum paste daisies ( 40 small, 12 medium, and 4 large). I spent a couple of hours over two nights making the daisies and playing with the design.

I have been making all scratch cakes but I decided for this one to use a mix to make at least part of this a little easier. Since I don't really make boxed cakes I wasn't prepared for how much it was going to rise. I filled the pan less than half full and it was over the top when it was done. I'll know better next time.

One thing I have never been successful at was using a real butter cream frosting. I decided this was the occasion to try again. I figured if it wasn't working out I could quickly make the "Wilton" butter cream recipe. It came out fantastic and wasn't too difficult to work with. It did get a little hard to work with when it started to get warm but I would just chill it for a little bit and it would be fine again. I can say it was definitely worth it. It was much better than the "Wilton" Crisco butter cream recipe. It melted in your mouth and tasted much better in my opinion.

The project was a big success. Everyone liked the cake and they liked the fabulous punch my wife made. I have to admit I liked the boxed cake better than the scratch cakes I have been making. I am very interested to see how the Barefoot Blogger cakes come out and see if they can beat the box for me. Stay tuned!