My First Cake Order

I never thought of making fancy cakes for money. As I've said before, I'm really not the most artistic person in the world, so why would someone want to pay me to not be artistic? So, while I didn't understand it, I went for it and took a commission to bake and decorate a cake for a friend.

Of course, I couldn't just go for a simple one level chocolate cake. Nope, I decided to try (for the first time) a two tier chocolate cake with chocolate swiss meringue buttercream and pureed strawberry filling. Go big or go home right? In defense of my sanity, the cake was not enormous. The bottom tier was only 8 inches in diameter and the top tier was only 3.5 inches in diameter, so it was more like a mini tiered cake.

I had the whole process planned out to the hour. Friday morning I was going to put the cake in the oven so that while I was at work, it would cool and then I could do the crumb coat when I got home. No pressure, no stress, no worries. Of course this plan fell through within minutes. The cake didn't get into the oven until about 8:00pm Friday night, and while the two little top tier cakes turned out very well, the 8 inch bottom tier took an hour and 45 minutes to cook through. I don't know whether it was the oven, the batter, or the fact that the pan was deeper than the recipe called for. When it FINALLY came out it seemed no worse for wear, but after I let it cool outside the pan for a little bit, I realized that the crust of the cake was more than a little brick-like. While the cake was taking forever to bake, I made the filling in my (awesome) food processor, combining just strawberries and pectin. The strawberries were sweet enough on their own that they didn't need any extra sugar. And besides, the cake was chocolate ontop of chocolate ontop of more chocolate, more sugar was not necessary. I would have to carve the outer layer of crust off the cake before I could do anything with it. It was pushing 1:00am before I went to bed, cakes wrapped in saran wrap, butter and eggs sitting on the counter waiting to be mixed into decadent chocolate frosting.

Saturday was awesome. I had so much fun all day putting the cake together that I didn't even mind getting up at 7:00am.

I started with the swiss meringue chocolate buttercream. It worked out way better than it ever had in the past. I really think the key to baking is actually using ingredients that are room temperature (and not stuff right from the fridge with the excuse that it's the room temperature in Nunavut...). With the hard crusts cut off, I sliced the bigger cake into three layers and put together three layers of the smaller cakes as well. Once filled and crumb coated, the big cake was ready to go sit on the porch outside to cool along with the small (and much more difficult) cake.

After that it was easy. A final coat of buttercream, smoothed out with a heated spatula, piping out "happy birthday mom" (the most difficult word being "mom"), and some chocolate flowers. It was finished 45 minutes before she came to pick it up. Awesome timing on my part! Maybe I need to work on that part for next time. My only issue with the cake is that I don't get to try it to see if it turned out as delicious as I intended. I'll have to figure out how to work around that issue for next time too...