[Inez] Vanilla cake with raspberry filling

I finally found a vanilla cake recipe to use for the wedding cake. I made this one two weekends ago to test the recipe, and took it in to work with me because I don't want my housemates to get sick of cake. That would be sad.

For the practice cake I used a recipe from Joy the Baker for Vanilla Butter Cake. Her recipe is for 12 cupcakes; I multiplied the recipe by three and divided it between two 9 inch round pans.

I picked this one to try because it follows a similar process as the coconut cake I love so much. You add butter to flour, sugar, and other dry ingredients and then beat it until it becomes sandy. This recipe then has you add half of the milk and beat it just until incorporated.

Mix the rest of the wet ingredients, and finish adding to the dry mixture.

I'm pretty sure I've talked about torting before. Torting is where you take a layer of cake and cut it in half so that it forms two thin layers of cake. I did that. Then I got fancy. If you have a colorful filling and a white frosting, you don't really want the filling to show between the layers when you get it all frosted up. So I piped a ring of plain vanilla cream cheese frosting around the outside of each layer...

...before adding the raspberry cream cheese filling.

See? You can't tell there's raspberry anywhere in there.

Ta da!

Side note: I used royal icing for the piped decorations here. #1 It's a totally different color white. #2 It's extremely sensitive to humidity (hello, I live in Washington, DC, built on a swamp - it's humid here) and grease (such as, for example, the grease of a butter-cream cheese-whipped cream frosting). So it had melted by the next morning. Scrap that idea.