I foolishly volunteered to make our wedding cake. I like making cakes, but this is ridiculous. Those of you who will be at the wedding will get to experience the real thing. Everyone else can feast their eyes on my test runs.
I’ve been trying different recipes, basically all from The Cake Bible, an outstanding book that covers literally everything you could want to know about making cakes. The only thing it lacks is a great standard carrot cake (there’s a carrot wheat ring, but not a regular carrot cake — I might have to adapt it). Here are some of the cakes I’ve made in the past month or two.
Note: My favorite recipe from the Cake Bible is the sour cream coffee cake, which I’ve made a couple times in the past couple months (once for Carol and Josh’s wedding present). It’s the best coffeecake I’ve ever tasted, but they’re sort of hard to stack, so it’s out of the running for a wedding cake.
This is the only recipe I’ve made that’s not from The Cake Bible. It’s one of my dad’s favorite cake recipes, and I like it a lot too, so I tried it. The fun part of this cake is the sour cream and baking soda that makes it rise. You mix them together and they bubble and fizz, then go in the batter. It’s an excellent cake, but turned out a little dense.
This was my first experiment with a real buttercream frosting too, raspberry in this case. It’s actually cream frosting on the inside, butter on the outside — cream is really good, but it doesn’t keep at room temperature. Refrigerating a cake takes away some of the flavor, so for the wedding I’ll be using buttercream everywhere. I didn’t have any seedless raspberry to use, so I just used what we had on hand. It’s good, but the flavor takes some getting used to for someone who’s used to the five parts sugar to one part butter recipes you find in The Joy of Cooking.
This is the one described in the book as “the tenor of chocolate cakes”. I don’t know what that means, but it’s very tasty. All of the chocolate cakes in the book use cocoa instead of chocolate, unlike the Decadent Chocolate Cake, which calls for baking chocolate. This was the first cake I’ve made with cocoa. It’s not frosted, as you can see, because it’s quite rich on its own. It’s good, but come out a bit dry, at least after it cooled. If I could keep the moisture in this one, I’d love it even more.
This was the first white cake I’d ever made. I tend to like cakes with stuff in them like spices, chocolate, or carrot. However, the traditional wedding cake is white, so I had to try it. Besides, it was in the book; it had to be good. And it was. There’s nothing to this cake but butter, sugar, and flour really. It’s lighter than a pound cake, with a delicate buttery flavor. Still, it’s not for me. I have to have my cinnamon, chocolate, or whatever to spruce up the flavor. The recipe is very good though, and I am likely to make at least one tier of our cake this white one.
This is a very aptly named cake. Oh boy. It is so good. When I think of a chocolate cake, this is what I think of. Actually, I think of some chocolate cake I had when I was probably eight years old at a restaurant in New Hampshire, but that wasn’t as good as this one.
There is a lot of butter in this cake. A lot. Between the frosting and the cake itself there’s a pound. Yum. It’s well worth the strain on your heart, though, believe me. Just get some exercise afterward, you’ll be fine. As things currently stand, this is the one I’ll be using at the wedding.
This one also looks slightly less amateurish than my previous attempts. I had a real spatula and a turntable to help with the frosting, which made things much easier to do right. This is another raspberry frosting, but I had seedless jam this time, so it looks nicer. For the wedding, I’m hoping to make my own raspberry puree and syrup to use in the frosting, for very rich raspberry flavor. That’s going to require a good food mill, or an attachment for a cuisinart that will do the trick. We’ll see.