Saturday, December 29, 2012

Goodbye

For his goodbye cake, Chris requested a spice cake with cream cheese frosting (how appropriate for a bagel bakery). I'm trying to get away from box mixes, so I used the Velvet Spice Cake recipe from The Joy of Cooking. I've never made a cake before that involved folding in beaten egg whites. It ended up having a super moist and soft texture. I was a little worried because the recipe said to bake it in a tube or Bundt pan, but the Wilton strips helped keep the layers evenly baked.

Cakes in the oven
 No pictures of crumb coat, because I am horrible at crumb coating.  I made the frosting too thin for the crumb coat so crumbs still came through the final frosting layer.

Coloring was fun, because I was going for vibrant colors. So far I've just been taking the colors right from the jars, but I think I should start experimenting with mixing. That purple could have been just a hair redder...

I added about a teaspoon of clear piping gel to about a cup of frosting to make it nice and smooth for writing. The soft frosting was very easy to get into the bags, too.
It helps having enough spatulas for all the colors

Prepped and ready to go!
 I was going for a peacock feel with this cake.  I didn't have a solid plan except for swirls. I can do a pretty sweet swirl patter with one or two colors, but the three colors threw me for a loop and I went with little groups of swirls all over the cake. I thought the writing turned out very well. I do plan on practicing my frosting penmanship to clean things up a bit.
Swirls and text, looking good

 I decided to try a reverse shell border because it seemed to fit the swirly theme, and because I hadn't done it since the class in which I learned it. I was very pleased with how it turned out. It's a little bit easier than the regular shell border.
Completed cake


Reverse shell border

Reverse shell border
I've gotten lots of compliments since dropping the cake off at work. Overall I'm happy with the result and looking forward to making something cool for my birthday.

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