The Great Wedding Cake Caper, Part 1
October 16th, 2007
When my dear friend Erin got engaged, I offered to make the wedding cake as a gift to her and Rocco. I’d never made a wedding cake before, but had plenty of baking experience. It sounded like fun! I’d always wanted to try making a wedding cake! Also, the wedding was over a year away at the time!
Over the coming months, Erin and I emailed back and forth about cake flavors (chocolate) and frosting options (more chocolate) and decorating styles. I researched how to make a three-tier stacked cake and compared recipes online. I remained confident and excited right up till two weeks before the wedding. That’s when I started worrying that doing a stacked cake for 100ish people would be more than I could handle. I was also stressed due to the difficulty I’d had finding a red dress for the wedding. (Did I mention I was also one of Erin’s attendants?) I’m not a naturally pessimistic person, though, so I shrugged it off, armed myself with cookbook and shopping list, and headed to Omaha.
Finding a great red dress on my first shopping day in Omaha perked me up considerably. So by the time I had gathered pans and shopped for ingredients, I was feeling confident again. Until everything nearly came to a screeching halt three days before the wedding because I could not find the key ingredient: Dutch process cocoa. I know it used to be common in grocery stores. I don’t know why it’s not anymore. I tried seven or eight stores before I finally found it at Penzeys. Crisis narrowly averted!
Since I was doing all this cake-making in Omaha, my cousin Tressa graciously allowed me to use her kitchen for the mixing and baking. Her kitchen was remodeled a couple of years ago, and boasts two ovens, plenty of counter space, and the all-important Kitchen-Aid stand mixer. My mom happened to be there too, watching Tressa’s kids all day, so Annalie had plenty of playmates to distract her while Troy and I worked. Two of the older kids helped me make pan liners by tracing circles onto parchment paper and cutting them out. It took about seven hours, start to finish, to mix, bake, cool, and wrap all eight layers for the three-tier chocolate cake and the two-layer white cake. Troy kept things running smoothly by washing bowls and pans and doing the heavy lifting (those 14″ pans are not light when they’re full of batter).
When we started baking, we still weren’t exactly sure how we were going to transport the wrapped layers back to my parents’ house, where we would store them till we were ready for the next step. As it turned out, we had pizza for lunch that day, and inspiration struck: why not use clean pizza boxes? Troy called Pizza Hut to ask about buying some, but when he explained they would be used for a wedding cake, they gave us the eight boxes we needed for free. Score! And they worked perfectly.
So. I found a red dress. The cake layers were baked, wrapped, and transported safely. Sour cream and Ghirardelli bittersweet chocolate were waiting patiently to be turned into deep, dark, delicious frosting. So far, so good.
In Part 2: The first batch of frosting is a disaster! An eleventh-hour substitution must be made! The cake…gets stacked! Dunh dunh duuunh!…
To see more photos, go to Erin & Rocco’s wedding cake - a photoset on Flickr
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October 16th, 2007 at 2:38 am
YEY!!!! You’re up and running. I really like you’re mast head too. Very classy. It was one of my favorite’s that you had to choose from.
October 16th, 2007 at 2:46 am
I can’t get you on Bloglines. Comes up as feedburner weblog. Oh, and cake photos are not good at 1 am. I’m even hungrier after this post.
Feed is fixed.
October 16th, 2007 at 9:10 am
Yay!!!!!! You’re UP! Excellent first post! Woooooooot!
October 16th, 2007 at 11:18 am
Congrats on the new blog! It looks great :)
October 16th, 2007 at 11:56 am
Hooray for your site! Wheeeeeee! I’m commenting and emailing you at the same time :)
October 16th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
I’m so excited you’re blogging! NOW get your feed fixed so I can check up on you regularly. :)
It’s fixed. Thank you so much for all of your help, especially the WordPress Wednesdays!
October 16th, 2007 at 9:02 pm
aspenglow@flickr, peeking in to say hello! :)
October 16th, 2007 at 10:03 pm
Bloglines, baby!!! I’m all hooked up and waitin’ for more.
October 17th, 2007 at 1:00 am
That was a pretty impressive undertaking you took. And I have a whole new respect for Pizza Hut for giving you the free boxes.
October 17th, 2007 at 3:03 am
Fabulous! You went straight into my Bloglines account. Can’t wait for more!
October 17th, 2007 at 5:24 am
Ha! Some things never change–she writes and reads with a passion….and interrupts people mid-stream…and admits it! Memories! What a joy to read!
Uh-oh, people, my 6th-grade teacher is reading my blog. ;-) Thanks, Rob! I guess I haven’t changed all that much, have I?
October 17th, 2007 at 6:23 am
It is such a wonderfully beautiful and unique cake. Very fall like. Love it! Congrats for making the blog leap so successfully!
Woot!
October 17th, 2007 at 7:42 am
Oh wow! It looks so pretty! I love that masthead, too, and all the photos!
October 17th, 2007 at 10:17 am
I’ve added you to my Google Reader. Hurray!!
October 17th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
Did you use Rose’s The Cake Bible? Or Martha Stewart’s Wedding book for your recipe? I have made a wedding cake once, and it was, as you say, extremely time consuming, and mine was a lot smaller than your undertaking. Can’t wait to read more!
Blog looks great, and you’re in my bloglines!
I used Dede Wilson’s Wedding Cakes You Can Make. I liked her philosophy, which was basically: do your best, but don’t expect perfection; and remember the cake isn’t just for looking at, it’s for eating so it better taste amazing! And thanks. :-)
October 18th, 2007 at 7:36 am
I’m excited to see that you started a blog. You did an amazing job on the cakes and it looks like they were enjoyed by all.
October 18th, 2007 at 7:36 am
Congratulations! It looks like you are an old hand at this stuff already.
*adding you to my daily bookmarks*
October 18th, 2007 at 8:28 am
I’m saying hello as instructed by SAJ. I really loved this first post and am looking forward to more. I’m adding you to my google reader.
October 18th, 2007 at 8:47 am
Yay! ’bout time. ;) heehee. Great post, Deary.
October 18th, 2007 at 8:52 am
I got so excited about your blogging that I forgot: what IS the deal with stores not carrying dutch Process cocoa? That’s a pet peeve of ours, good chocolate. We have some Dutch friends whose family sends them some of the good stuff every year near Thanskgiving and then if they run out. It’s cheaper for them that way, to have the good stuff sent to them. Last year they gave us some. Oh, my, it was good.
But have you checked out any health food stores or organic markets? Our local organic/health food store jsut started carrying a new brand of dpc for us all to test. I hope to go get me some this weekend to try.
I tried the local grocery chains, Whole Foods, Wild Oats Market, Cost Plus World Market, Williams-Sonoma, and Sur La Table. At each store the salespeople said when asked, “Yes, I’m sure we carry Dutch process cocoa.” Then when they couldn’t find it, “Huh. I thought we carried that!” It’s a mystery. I recommend Penzeys, though–it’s reasonably priced and you can buy it online if you aren’t near a store.
October 18th, 2007 at 9:01 am
Great first post! My mom’s hobby is baking wedding cakes and such for people… for the past 30 years now. This definitely made me smile. We’ve had several different disasters, but it always works out. Its always interesting to see what links people will go to making their first cake. You definitely went above and beyond!
October 18th, 2007 at 10:04 am
Yay! You’re a blogger!
Congratulations on the new site, it looks great.
October 18th, 2007 at 10:39 am
Hooray for the great new site! I’ve read all your comments at saj for a while now and always wished you had a blog. You are certainly a good friend taking on a wedding cake, I am duly impressed.
October 19th, 2007 at 8:35 am
Yippee! I so missed catching up on your world while Troy was away. All the pictures of foreign lands and activities at sea…brought back memories. Now I look forward to filling up on crafts and cooking and most enjoyable…ANNALIEISMS!!! Miss you guys. Carry on with the blogging! …and isn’t the weather change just lovely??? I feel almost giddy!
October 29th, 2007 at 12:17 am
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July 21st, 2008 at 6:58 pm
It seems you had a lot of fun baking your first wedding cake.. :)
July 21st, 2008 at 7:00 pm
Wow! You did an excellent job. Your cake looks delicious..
September 15th, 2008 at 3:32 am
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