First Cake!

Layer cake with butter-cream frosting and fondant a successful test run. I've made cakes in the past, but I'm really calling this my first cake, as it has all the bells and whistles my prior cakes sorely lacked. Now I'm cake obsessed and I feel compelled to spend hundreds of dollars on all the little cake making/decorating accessories you find on the Wilton website. But no, I must be thrifty! I'm going to poor-girl it and see if I can hunt down cheap alternatives to a lot of the tools on the website. Of course, I'll share them with y'all. :)

Happy Cake

First recipe up, the fondant. Now, there's a stigma behind fondant tasting, well... like ass. And since I'm not about to go out and put down hard earned cash on actual fondant, I'm going to make it myself. And since I'm not about to go out and put down hard earned cash on some of the ingredients of fondant (glycerin, glucose, gelatin), I'm making a simple recipe for marshmallow fondant I found on this website: Make Fabulous Cakes. Make this stuff beforehand and stash it in the fridge. It should be allowed to sit for several hours before applying to cakeness. And yes, it tastes awesome.

Marshmallow Fondant

• 1 bag mini marshmallows (or about 454 grams)
• 2 tbsp water
• 5-6 C powdered sugar
• flavoring of your choice, I used 1 tsp almond extract

1. Find yourself a big ol' bowl and throw in the marshmallows and the water. Nuke in the microwave for 1 minute. Stir thoroughly with a spoon that is coated liberally in shortening. Continue nuking for 30 second intervals, stirring well in between until the marshmallows are perfectly smooth. 
2. At this point, add in the extract and any coloring you'd like. If you're looking for an intense color, you may want to add a liiiittle more coloring than you think will be needed, because the powdered sugar's going to probably pale it up a bit. *By the way, I think liquid food color sucks for this. Spend a little well earned cash on the gel stuff, or powdered if you can find it.
3. SIFT in the powdered sugar. I didn't sift, and later I had to kneed the stuff a hell of a lot longer to get the lumps out. Stir the powdered sugar in until you can barely move the spoon anymore. Then get some shortening all over your hands and kneed the rest of the sugar in. You'll want to scrape the sides of the bowl periodically to try to get as much of it in as possible, but by the end you'll still have a good crust of stuff cemented to the bowl that you just can't do much about. 
4. Once you got a big ball of play-dough looking stuff, wrap the ball in plastic wrap (make sure you spray the wrap with Pam first). Stick that in a Zip-loc bag and put it in the fridge. 

Second recipe, the cake. I found the base recipe from Darlene at Make Fabulous Cakes. I tweeked it slightly, like I'm prone to do.

Nekkid Cake!

Chocolate Amaretto Cake

• 2 C cake flour
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 3/4 C unsweetened cocoa
• 2 C sugar
• 3/4 C hot coffee
• 1/4 C amaretto
• 1 C milk
• 2 large eggs
• 1 tsp almond extract

1. Preheat oven to 350° and line two 9" round cake pans with parchment or wax circles. I also took the time to grease and flour the sides of the pans. 
2. Sift together flour, salt, baking soda, baking powder, cocoa and sugar in a large mixing bowl.
3. Make a well in the center and pour on the coffee, amaretto and milk. Mix it thoroughly for a minute or two. 
4. Add in the eggs and extract and mix again for another minute or two, making sure to scrape the sides of the bowl. Keep in mind that this batter is going to be very loose and liquidy.
5. Pour the batter evenly into the two cake pans and bake for about 30 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean when inserted.
6. Let the cakes cool in the pans for about 10 minutes, then turn out onto drying racks. (I usually flip them out onto a tray, then flip them back onto the drying rack. Carefully!) Let cool completely before frosting.

And lastly (but not leastly) the butter-cream frosting. I got this base recipe from Cupcake Project. Hers is a vanilla bean butter-cream, but for this cake I switched out the vanilla bean paste for the liquid from a jar of maraschino cherries, cherry extract and almond extract, and I added slightly more powdered sugar. Also, you'll want to triple this recipe to make sure you have enough for the cake and filling. (Only double it if you have an alternative filling in mind.)

The crumb layer, or "skin"

Cherry Almond Butter-Cream Frosting

• 1 3/4 C powdered sugar (add more for a thicker consistency)
• 1/2 C unsalted butter (room temp)
• 2 tsp liquid from jar of Maraschino Cherries
• 1 tsp cherry extract
• 1 tsp almond extract
• 1 tbsp milk

1. Cream together butter and powdered sugar until light and fluffy. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix thoroughly. 

Now you may be asking yourself, what next? Well, I won't get into the intricate details, there are plenty of websites that have tutorials on how to handle fondant and whatnot. I definitely recommend Wilton's website for ideas.

What I did first was take one of the cake layers, put it on its final resting place (some sort of tray) and slather butter-cream all over the top. You'll find that most bakers recommend piping a "dam" around the top of the circumference of the cake so that when you put the other layer on top, the filling won't squish out over the sides.

Once the cake is filled, stick on the top layer upside down so that the top is now a good flat surface. Find yourself a good, long serrated knife. Trim the top and sides of the cake until it looks all pretty like. Grab a brush (the kind you'd use to slather on bbq sauce) and brush away the crumbs off the tray and the cake itself.

Using an offset spatula, spread on the frosting. There are many methods on doing this so that crumbs don't get in the frosting, but even if they do, you're putting fondant over it anyway, right? Once complete, refrigerate (or freeze) until it's good and firm.

Kneed the fondant ball until pliable, I recommend following this tutorial on what to do next: Covering Cakes with Fondant.

Here is my result. For the lettering I just stuck my finger in food coloring and finger-painted it on. Not really recommended. It was 1 in the morning by this point so I didn't dilly dally with the frills. I just put a border around the bottom (little fondant balls) and called it a day.

Happy Baker!