The Wedding Cake Experiment: Part 1, Bake it Up!

I have a confession to make. Since I first got into making big beautiful layer cakes about 2 years ago, I’ve really, REALLY wanted to make a wedding cake. A cake that not only looked good, but also tasted fantastic. Call me crazy, but it was my personal equivalent of running a marathon–something I wanted to do at least once, just to prove to myself that I could do it.

But how do you ask someone to make their wedding cake when you’ve never done one before? Well luckily, someone asked me.

About a month ago, my mom sent me an email asking if I would be interested in making a wedding cake for one of her employees. I agreed to do the cake pretty quickly–and then realized what I had done–I had agreed to make a cake for a reception Saturday, November 28th, the Saturday AFTER Thanksgiving. EEK! A day I had already scheduled a dinner party. DOUBLE EEK!!

As I started a major panic, Noel tried to calm me down by suggesting that I call Eileen. You remember Eileen right? Well we did a couple of baby shower cakes together this past summer, and Eileen is from a long line of wedding cake creators. Not only did she agree to help, but of course being Eileen she had a ton of fantastic ideas about how to put thing together and how to decorate!

After a whole bunch of research and some help from the ladies at the Cake and Wedding Cottage, we embarked on our experiment this past weekend, with the baking of the cakes on Saturday. ALL DAY on Saturday. On the advice of the ladies at the Cake Cottage we decided to do a yellow cake for our 12-inch base tier, with an 8-inch red velvet tier (the bride’s favorite) and a 6-inch cake topper tier. Eileen brought her mixer over and we had dueling mixers going as she put together the red velvet and I worked on the yellow butter cake.

Phew! It was a lot of work! The actual putting together of the cakes wasn’t so hard (even though we ended up making super big batches of each) but the baking itself was pretty time consuming, since we only had one oven and a total of six cakes to bake. Five hours after we started, we had our tiers–perfect, even and level–and ready for the freezer. And we had a bonus baby bundt, a yellow butter and red velvet swirl made with the leftover batter!

Red Velvet Cake
Adapted from Baked

We had been warned by the ladies at the Cake Cottage that red velvet could be notoriously hard to work with. So we decided to use a recipe from my go to source–the Baked cookbook. Their recipe was for a triple layer cake, so I felt comfortable that we should be able to do a double layer cake with it. The recipe below is for a single triple layer version of the cake–we doubled it though to fill our 2 8-inch tiers and 2 6-inch tiers, and had a bit leftover to stir into the bundt above. We also used only butter in this recipe, even though it called for shortening, because I’m scared of Crisco.

Ingredients:

• 1/4 cup dark unsweetened cocoa powder
• 2 tablespoons red gel food coloring (see note below)
• 1/4 cup boiling water
• 8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened, cut into small pieces
• 1 2/3 cups sugar
• 3 large eggs
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 2 1/2 cups cake flour
• 1 teaspoon fine salt
• 1 tablespoon white vinegar
• 1 teaspoon baking soda

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Butter three 8-inch round cake pans, line the bottoms with parchment paper, and butter the parchment. Dust with flour, and knock out the excess flour.
2. In a medium bowl, whisk together the cocoa powder, food coloring, and boiling water. Set aside to cool. In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream the butter and shortening until smooth. Scrape down the bowl and add the sugar. Beat until the mixture is light and fluffy, about 5 minutes. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.
3. Stir the buttermilk and vanilla into the cooled cocoa mixture. Sift the flour and salt together into another medium bowl. With the mixer on low, add the flour mixture, alternating with the cocoa mixture, to the egg mixture in three separate additions, beginning and ending with the flour mixture. Beat until incorporated. In a small bowl, combine the vinegar and baking soda and stir until the baking soda dissolves; the mixture will fizz. Add to the batter and stir until just combined.
4. Divide the batter among the prepared pans and smooth the tops. Bake until a toothpick inserted in the center of each cake comes out clean, about 30 minutes, rotating the pans halfway through the baking time. Transfer the cakes to a wire rack and let cool for 20 minutes. Invert the cakes onto the rack, remove the pans, and let cool completely. Remove the parchment.

Vanilla Buttermilk Cake
Adapted from Sky High

This recipe makes a lot of cake–15 3/4 cups to be exact. The Sky High cookbook has recipes for this cake sized to other sizes–including a 3 6-inch tiers and 3 9-inch tiers. Those recipes are widely available around these interwebs, so I’m going to post the big old monster recipe we used for our cake. This recipe makes so much batter, it has to be mixed by hand and you have to bake each 12 inch layer by itself in the oven. But it is sooo worth it!

Ingredients:

• 6 2/3 cups cake flour
• 4 1/3 cups sugar
• 3 tablespoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 pound, plus 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
• 2 3/4 cups buttermilk
• 9 whole eggs
• 4 egg yolks
• 1 1/2 tablespoons vanilla extract

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Butter 12 inch round cake pans. Line the bottom of each pan with a round of parchment paper or waxed paper and butter the paper.
2. Combine the cake flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt in a large mixer bowl. With the mixer on low speed, blend for 30 seconds. Add the butter and 2 cups of buttermilk (this will make a mess all over your counter, even if you use your mixer shield!). Mix on low speed briefly to blend; then raise the speed to medium and beat until light and fluffy, 2 to 3 minutes. Because this is such a large amount of batter, at this point, you will need to finish the cake by hand.
3. Pour the batter into a very large (10-12 quart) shallow bowl. In a smaller bowl, whisk together the whole eggs, yolks, vanilla, and the remaining 3/4 cup buttermilk until well blended. Pour one-third of mixture into the cake batter and fold in completely with a large rubber or silicone spatula. Repeat this step twice with the remaining egg mixture, folding it completely after each addition. There will be about 15 3/4 cups of batter. Measure out 5 1/4 cups of batter for each of the 3 pans.
4. Bake for about 35 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean. Allow the cake to cool in the pan for 15 minutes.
5. Turn the layers out onto wire racks by placing a rack on top of a pan, inverting it, and lifting the pan. Peel off the paper liners and let cool completely.

Since our wedding isn’t until NEXT weekend, we put each of our cakes on its own foil wrapped piece of cardboard, then triple wrapped them all individually for freezing. Yeah, I know you would think freezing a cake would degrade it’s taste, but our experience with the baby shower cakes was that as long as the time in the freezer is relatively short (less than a week) you can’t even tell it was frozen, and it makes handling the layers a lot easier. Which we will definitely need, since stacking this cake up is going to be one enormous challenge for next Friday. So we better not eat too much turkey on Thursday, cause we gotta be sharp on Friday!

Come back next weekend to see how this all stacks up!

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