Yummy Goodness

Well, I'm going to tell you about the fillings I made. For the chocolate cake I made Chocolate Almond Ganache (perfect for a chocoholic) and for the vanilla cake I made Vanilla Chocolate Chip Buttercream.

For the Ganache I used 2 pounds of chocolate (the recipe said to spend the money and get good chocolate well I used Bakers chocolate since the expensive stuff comes in smaller amounts and Bakers chocolate is good anyways!) 4 cups of heavy cream and Almond extract.

Start by chopping the chocolate until it's very fine. You'll have great arm muscles once you're done with this step! Hahaha. Here's once box chopped.

 8 ounces

 16 ounces (I'm not sure why this program keeps flipping my pictures and I don't know how to flip them back)

 24 ounces

 And 32 ounces!!

Heat the cream to almost boiling in the microwave. I also added my almond flavoring here, use as much or as little as you like.

 Pour the hot cream over the chocolate pieces.

 Let stand for 5 minutes (this is why you want the chocolate chopped as much as possible so that it will melt quickly).

 Now stir until smooth and you're done! Keep in refrigerator until you want to use it. It gets hard as it cools so what I ended up doing was putting the bowl in a hot water bath when I was ready to use it until it was a nice spreadable consistancy.

 Now for the Vanilla Chocolate Chip Buttercream:

1 pound confectioner's sugar

1/2 cup milk

1/8 to 1/4 tsp salt

1/2 tsp vanilla

2 sticks butter, cut into 1/2 inch slices

1/2 cup shortening

3/4 cup chocolate chips, crumbled in a food processor

One package vanilla instant pudding mix

Using the wisk attachment on your electric mixer mis the confectioner's sugar, pudding mix, chocolate chips, vanilla and milk at low speed until smooth.

Add butter one slice at a time until incorporated.

Add shortening and whip at highest speed 10-12 minutes until volume increases by at least 50%

And there you are. This needs to be stored in the fridge also and I did the same thing with a hot water bath for it when I was ready for it.

Now, I was going to do the fondant in this one too but Matt's awake so I'll do it in another one. That one couple potentially be a long one anyways. So, enjoy!!!

Cakes cakes cakes

Well now that the cake is done, the shower is over and the cake is gone I can blog about it!!! This may take a few blogs for everything so that I don't have one huuuuuuuge blog. So I will start with the cakes themselves. I did one 16 inch square and one 12 inch square, and I drew out my design.

Now, a 16 inch takes 15 1/2 cups of batter. A normal box cake mix makes 4 1/2 cups of batter. So I used 4 boxes and measured 2 cups of batter out of the last box so that I had exactly what the pan can handle and made cupcakes out of the extra batter. A 12 inch takes 10 cups so I used 3 boxes and did that same thing. Here's the Wilton website to help you figure out how much batter any 2 inch deep pan takes.

Now, for the 16 inch one I did chocolate so I greased the pan with Crisco and dusted it with cocoa powder.

Here's the pan with one box.

Two boxes

Three boxes

And the 2 cups I measured out of the last box.

The Wilton website also tells you how long to bake cakes and at what temperature.

Now for the Vanilla cake. I greased with Crisco again and dusted with flour.

Here's one box

 Two boxes

And plus one cup to make 10 cups

So, two dozen eggs later, the cakes are in the oven!



And here they are!

 Now, what I do next is I let it sit for 5 minutes, cover it with plastic wrap, flip it upside down onto a board and put weight on top of it to help make the top of the cake flat.

I leave it like this for about 15 minutes. Then I take the weight and the pan off (be careful because the pan will still be hot) and let the cake cool completely.

Once it's cool I wrap the plastic wrap up and around it, and put more plastic around it from the bottom (which is facing up at this point) I lay it over the bottom (pictured below), put the cake pan (which has been cleaned and thoroughly dried) on it, flip it back over and finish wrapping the plastic wrap around it.

 This is before I finished pulling the wrap all the way around it.

Now they're ready to be put in the freezer! I like to put them in there because that means I can bake them off whenever I have time in advance, it makes it easier to cut them if you're going to put a filling in them (it's just a little hard in the middle when it's frozen but there are less crumbs) and helps with frosting it since it's not so crumbly when it's frozen. Note: do not freeze a decorated cake, I have never tried this but I can imagine that the frosting would lose something and it will make the colors run when it thaws out. Also, if you're doing more than one of one size when the cake is frozen you can take it out of the cake pan and re-use the pan for the next one.

If you have the time to decorate your cake the day of don't worry about it being frozen, they thaw out quickly. So you could pull it out in the morning to decorate it and it'll be ready to be enjoyed within probably only an hour.

Next blog will be the fillings and fondant!!