In case you missed it: Part 1.

Things had gone really well on Friday with mixing and baking the vast quantities of cake required to serve 100-120 people. We were still flushed with triumph from hacking the pizza-box solution to transporting the baked layers. So we greeted Saturday’s tasks with confidence: torting the layers, dabbing with moistening syrup, making the frosting, filling the layers, assembling the tiers, frosting with a crumb coat and a final coat. Easy, right?

Hahahahaha! Ahem. Pardon me.

Things started out well enough. I made the moistening syrup that morning, which wasn’t much more complicated than boiling water. The next task was to tort the layers—to slice each one in half horizontally. (This adds height to the finished cake, because instead of one layer of filling per tier you get three.) With the smaller cakes, this wasn’t too much of a challenge. But after looking through my parents’ kitchen while the syrup was bubbling away, I realized there wasn’t a knife in the house that would work well for slicing the 14-inch cakes. That seemed like a simple-enough fix, though. I headed to the store to look for a long, thin knife.

Two hours and four stores later, I was exhausted and had learned that you can’t buy a decent knife longer than eight inches for less than $50. I could have bought the 18-inch cake leveler that Wilton makes, but it cost $30, which seemed expensive at the beginning of my shopping trip. In the end, I decided to buy the 10-inch cake leveler for three bucks and a seven-inch knife and depend on Troy to help me out.

So by the time I got home, I was already a bit frazzled. But still upbeat! The frosting would be great! The recipe was easy enough and sounded positively decadent: melt 30 ounces of good-quality bittersweet chocolate, cool slightly, and combine with 3 cups of room-temperature, full-fat sour cream. How could it go wrong?

Oh, it could go very wrong. I had taken the sour cream out of the fridge an hour before I planned to make the frosting, as instructed by the recipe, and then waited another half-hour for good measure. When I added it to the chocolate, was cold enough that it caused the chocolate to clump up into little bits. Having had some experience working with melted chocolate, I still didn’t panic. I attempted to fix it by microwaving the whole mess on very low power and then stirring, but it just got slimy. I mucked with it for ten or fifteen minutes before dumping it down the drain.

Then, I had a small tantrum. WHY WAS THIS HAPPENING TO ME, GOD? WHY WHY WHY? THE WEDDING IS IN 27 HOURS AND I NEED THIS TO WORK! AAAAUUUGH! Troy remained calm, gave me a hug, and said he would try making the next batch for me. (Did I mention that I had to make this quantity five times over to fill and frost the entire cake? Or that my husband is very nearly perfect?)

This time we dumped the sour cream out on a plate and left it out till it felt room-temperature to the touch. It worked! Even so, the chocolate-sour cream mixture was very thick and tended to get thicker the more it was stirred. And, while delicious, it was almost overwhelmingly rich—I couldn’t imagine a whole cake covered in it. So I decided to use it as a filling and make a chocolate buttercream for the frosting. I’d had the foresight to borrow my cousin’s Kitchen-Aid stand mixer, and I was making vanilla buttercream for the white cake anyway, so making this last-minute change actually made my life easier.

Troy, having made one batch of the frosting-turned filling for me, offered to tort the cakes. I gratefully accepted his offer of help, and made the rest of the filling while he made torted the 6- and 10-inch layers with the cake leveler. Then he efficiently sliced the chocolate 14-inch layers while I rotated them as he cut and marveled at the fact that he was doing in five minutes what would have taken me an hour.

Dabbing the moistening syrup on each of the now-torted layers didn’t take long. Next I attempted to quickly get the filling spread before it stiffened up too much. It was tricky to work with, but I managed. Troy helped me assemble each tier, and we only had one minor disaster with the 14-inch tier because of a silly mistake I made. We ended up using a knife to trim off the crumbled edge, so that if anyone had taken a ruler to that tier it would have measured about 13.25 inches. Oh well. At this point we had a time-is-short-do-whatever-works mentality settling in. We ended up not torting or using moistening syrup on the white cake at all, just to save time. If I had to do it again, though, I wouldn’t skip those steps because I could totally tell the difference when I tried both cakes at the reception.

After a quick trip to the nearest grocery store for more ingredients, I made the vanilla and chocolate buttercreams as quickly as I could, because it was getting late. I filled the white cake, assembled it, and did the crumb coat (a thin coat of frosting that seals in the crumbs and makes a smooth surface for the final, pretty coat of frosting) before putting it in the fridge. The three chocolate tiers were already assembled, so I just had to frost them with the crumb coat while Troy moved things around in my parents’ refrigerator to find spots to put them all.

We put the rest of the buttercream in the fridge to await the final coat of frosting, cleaned up the kitchen quickly, and went to bed to get some much-deserved sleep.

I thought I was going to be able to fit the whole story into two parts, but I’m not. So stay tuned for Part 3, and find out if we made up a big hill to the wedding/reception site without anything horrible happening to the cakes!