I've been so incredibly busy lately but I thought I'd finally get around to posting about some recent projects. The first was for Kathleen & Andrew's engagement party that I hosted. Trista and I tackled this project together and we decided we needed to perfect a cookies'n'cream recipe for it. After a flop of a recipe for both cake and frosting the saturday before hand we were at a loss. Trista then found a wonderful recipe without a moment to spare. The party was Friday - so I decided I would bake and decorate the cakes Thursday, Trista was able to come over and help after some exams Thursday night. That was the first mistake.
I really really should have baked the cakes Wednesday so they would all be cool and ready to go Thursday..oh well. I made SO MUCH CAKE...used a giant sheet pan that I hadn't used before and I didn't bake it long enough for the size of the pan and that cake was undercooked...so garbage it went. Try again - next cake in that pan looked beautiful...now how the heck to get it out of the pan without breaking/crumbling when its that big?! Well I sure didn't know because in my attempts to get it out - half went onto some wax paper on the table while the other half came crashing out and headed to the floor - garbage it was!
Next I used my round cake - well the outside was cooking quickly and the inside was taking forever! It took 1 1/2 hours! So needless to say it was hard as a hockey puck - GARBAGE!
Ok - at this point I had a mini meltdown and threw in the towel...I was running low on ingredients, and still had no idea how to successfully bake this cake! Kathleen was over helping me by watching the baby while I was baking, and she ran out and picked up some more ingredients for me while I got my pans cleaned and started on the next batch. I'd pretty much had it - and decided to go with a recipe I know inside and out and I know the cooking times for my pans/ovens..etc...the first 10" cake was a plain old vanilla cake. Then I figured 'hey lets throw some oreos in it!' So the next 10", 2 8", and giant sheet pan were all oreo. They baked beautifully (yay!) I threw them in the way too many cake caddies I own and put them outside (it was snowing and freezing) to cool quickly so I could get to icing them. The giant sheet was because Trista and I had bought these awesome biscuit cutters in different sizes and we wanted to make a bunch of miniature wedding cakes.
So by the time the baking was done was around 10:30pm night before party night...when Trista arrived I had only cut and filled 2 of the 8" cakes...I was pretty behind LOL. So we cut out all of our little circles for the mini cakes, cut and filled all of the cakes. one of the 10" (there were 3) I cut so horribly wrongly (I somehow managed to snap my cake slicer the day before so I was just cutting with a knife and needed some practice apparently!) it was unsalvageable...it looked awful - GARBAGE!
Icing them was the easy part - used my fancy new mixer and icing was done really fast, icing took less than a few minutes per cake.
Then to make some fondant - well I'm a complete idiot (can ya tell yet?!) and added way too much icing sugar to marshmellow ratio for the fondant so again Trista had to rescue me...we finally got it made rolled it out and covered all of the cakes - actually I was pretty impressed with myself considering I'd only covered one other cake with fondant before and it took many, many, many attempts to do.
Trista was making all of the details and decorations for the cake (along with many, many rescues from me and my cake disasters! LOL) She made all of the daisies and all of the stripes to put along the cake. we had this from Wilton as our inspiration (as the wedding colors are black and pink)
Well at 2AM and after many many cakes, you start to hurry things along a little...we had 4 cakes we needed to cover with black fondant stripes and in an attempt to avoid making more fondant we just spaced our stripes out a whole bunch! Also instead of making the border with pink fondant balls I just piped on a bunch of pink ball type icing with a pink buttercream - threw the cakes on top of eachother and WENT TO BED! So this is how they turned out (there were 2 of these)
Next we had to do the mini cakes - well we were pretty much zombies at this point, so that idea quickly was scrapped - Trista made one absolutely beautiful mini cake for them (they requested a special one for them to freeze so they can eat it on their engage-a-versay) and she made this:
So all in all - my garbage the next day was very very heavy with way too much scrapped cake - the cakes were delicious and enjoyed by all I was exhausted, Matt was exhausted (laying floor and finished just in the knick of time!) Trista was I'm sure exhausted but it went well.
And just for good measure some more pictures from the party!
Punch with lots of vodka!
The drinks table - everyone had a wine glass and there were stemware tags I made for them to write their names on
Tissue paper poms - these were hanging all over in the wedding colors
Banner for the couple
and of course - the happy couple!
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