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.
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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.
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It helps having enough spatulas for all the colors |
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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.
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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.
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Completed cake |
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Reverse shell border |
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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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