My first Wedding Cake

So, you want to know how this happened?  Yeah, me too. 

Ok, ok.  I'll fill you in on the parts I remember.  Luckily I took pictures of most of it to help me remember to just say NO! the next time someone asks me to make an all buttercream cake for a wedding again.  j.k.  Kind of.  If it pays enough, I'll do it. :)

Up first: mixing the batter:

I used this chocolate cake recipe.  

It was pretty good, and it held up well with just a few crumbs.  Another plus is that it baked up pretty flat and even, Good news for any baker!  And the wedding guests seemed to like it. :)

After the mixing came the pouring and baking:

We used three sizes for the cake: these two are 10' and 6'.  You should use a heating core (the silver thing in the middle) for any cake 10' or larger.  It will bake more evenly and be friendly. :)

This is the bottom layer, at 14'.  Not to shabby. 

P.S.  I used Wilton's Cake Release and the cakes came out fabulously with no sticking!

A quick long trip into the oven and the cakes were done.

You know it's done when your toothpick comes out with a few moist crumbs attached.

This is how I looked/felt after 3 hours of baking, with more to come.  Literally we mixed, baked and cleaned from 5:30pm-1am.  Not fun!  What was fun was wearing my new chef's coat and apron!

For the night, to aid in icing, we wrapped all layers with Saran Wrap and had them chill out.  This helped with the stacking/icing crumb issue I was anticipating.

Making the icing was the easy part.  I used this icing.

I started with the middle 10' layer, but followed the same steps for all of them.  First, I unwrapped the layers and decided which would be the bottom.  Then I put some buttercream on top.

And stacked the next layer on top, bottom side up.  I find that usually the bottom side is the easiest to ice, but any side up is generally ok.

At this point, I measured all layers to be between 4 and 5 inches tall.

And I might have been a little obsessive about making sure they were all level.  I used the extra cake pieces I shaved off the tops to splint up layers that were not level.

Start by icing the sides with the icing tip to make sure your crumbs don't show.  Looking back, I probably would have done two coats of icing just to make sure it was completely crumb free, but one coat held up just fine.  :)  Then we used the icing tip to ice the top and were very meticulous in making sure the icing was as smooth as we could make it. 

Now, I would generally use a crusting buttercream so that I could use the famous paper towel "iron" method to ensure proper smoothness, but this buttercream did not crust.  It says it was supposed to, so I was super bummed.  I guess this is why you are supposed to test out the recipes before hand.  Oh well.

After all of the layers were iced, we transported them to the church and assembled.

Sorry there are no pics of the process, It took all I had to make sure that I didn't mess up the cake at this point.  We did have one stacking error and the middle tier fell mid-stack and we had to fix the icing on the bottom tier, but all in all the stacking was fairly easy.  (again, we used the bubble tea straws to aid)

Simple Ribbon was placed around the bottom of each tier to hide the board and flowers were arranged and placed inside.  (using cake picks, of course).

birds eye view

And, viola.  Done.  

Being poor turns me into a farm girl. :)

In other news, I'm broke.  But that's ok, because it provided me with this blog post:  Butter.

That's right.  I said butter.  I think it's an important thing to learn how to make properly.  Ready to learn?

Wait!  Let's back up a bit.  First you need to know that I taught my kids about the inventions of Benjamin Franklin this week.  This is important because he invented a rocking chair that churned butter while you rock.  So I thought it fitting to make butter with them on Friday as a treat.  We did it the old fashioned way, to fully understand and appreciate the importance of Ben's rocking chair.  So I poured some cream into jars, added salt and food coloring and let them at it.  Shake, shake and shake.  And 30 minutes later we had butter!  Exciting, I know.

I have had that story in the back of my mind all weekend, so you can understand why when I went to make the poor folk food of Mac&Cheese and didn't have butter, I was sad.  All was remedied and my eyes lit up when they spotted the leftover Heavy Whipping Cream in the back of the fridge!

I decided to use my kitchen-aid mixer to make it for me, cause lordy knows I'm not gonna shake rattle and roll all night long just for some food.  :)

Next time you find yourself at a loss for butter, try this:

Take some heavy cream and a dash of salt and toss them into your favorite mixing bowl.  Turn on the beater (I used the paddle attachment and then traded for the whisk.  Both should work fine.)

This should sound familiar.  And look familiar after awhile.  These are the same steps you use when making whipped cream.

Only, keep mixing after you reach the whipped cream stage.  It will begin to look like this, and flatten out.  I scrapped the sides at this stage.

After a bit, it will turn into butter chunks and buttermilk.  I had to dump some of the buttermilk and then keep mixing because of all the splashing!

When it looks like this, strain the buttermilk out.

You need to add cool water and kneed the butter together by hand.  Keep dumping the water and adding more until the water runs clear.  When it does, you will have the best butter ever!

Yummo.

Double yum!  Enjoy!