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!!