[Inez] Wedding cake: practice round (part 1)

I know I just posted about a cake I made a week ago... but I made an even more exciting cake last weekend. Hope you're cool with that.

This does not include the ingredients I already had in the house.

So first, to review. I'm making a wedding cake for my dear friend Steph, who was my freshman roommate, my sophomore roommate, my junior roommate, and would have probably been my senior roommate if I hadn't done Quaker house. As it was, I spent about as much time at Steph's apartment as my own, senior year. See there's this funny thing where if you're a senior trying to write your thesis and you live with a bunch of sophomores, they JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND THE VALUE OF QUIET. I mean, glad you had fun, people. And glad I had another living room I could go write in.

Um, anyway. Steph. Wedding cake. Oh yes, review: 12 inch tier = hazelnut cake with chocolate filling, 9 inch  tier = vanilla cake with raspberry filling, 6 inch tier (plus additional sheet cake to feed the masses) = chocolate with orange filling. I'm flying out to California in 15 days to make this happen.

Day One: bake six layers of cake. Each tier will have two layers, and each layer will be torted for greater height and a more exciting cake-to-frosting ratio. I didn't take pictures of the baking process because how many pictures of flour can I really expect you to appreciate? Here's my fridge after all the cakes were baked:

Eat food, watch Dr. Who, sleep.

Day Two: Make four kinds of cream cheese frosting (fillings detailed above, plus vanilla cream cheese frosting to cover the outside of the cake).

Here's my Cream Cheese Frosting Recipe.

• 2 pkg cc
• 1 stick butter
• 1 t vanilla and/or 1 vanilla bean
• ~1 c confectioners suger (to taste... I usually do a bit less than a cup)
• ~1-1.5 c whipping cream 

Cream the butter first before anything because otherwise sometimes you may end up with little butter bits that don't mix in all the way if the butter isn't quite soft. Then add the cc, vanilla, confectioners sugar, and beat until fully combined. Whip the cream and fold in.

Before adding whipped cream.

Raspberry: Measure out about 1 cup of raspberries, strain slightly to remove some of the liquid. Add to butter/cc mix before folding in the whipped cream.

Chocolate: Melt 4 oz semi-sweet baker's chocolate, let cool somewhat. Add to butter/cc mix before folding in the whipped cream. Reduce confectioners sugar to about 1/2 cup.

Orange: Add the zest of one orange, 1 T orange juice, and a scant 1/4 t orange extract to butter/cc mix before folding in the whipped cream. Add more of anything to taste -- but go easy on the orange extract; it can easily overpower the frosting.

Fold in the whipped cream with a gentle touch. These are clouds, baby, you don't want to crush them.

The frosting will about double in size when you add the whipped cream. Awesome.

When you've got all the frostings made up, fill and frost each individual layer as if it were its own cake. Do it right. Make it pretty. Don't worry too much about the bottom edge.

Now here's the deal. If you've refrigerated the frosting, you have to let it sit out for a while before frosting. If it's still cold, there will be lots of air bubbles that get in the way of smoothing it out. You can fold the frosting again to encourage it to soften up. It may lose some of its fluffiness, but it's worth it if you don't have the time/patience to let it sit out.

Put these bad boys in the fridge. Cover them up. Don't worry too much if you bang them a tiny bit getting them in or out, you can fix them tomorrow. Go to the pizza place down the street with your friends, have some dinner. Have a beer. Go to sleep.

Coming soon: see Part 2 for assembly and decoration)