Our First Wedding Cake!

As many of you know, Elle and Aidan have been huge contributors to our wedding! They've been companions as we've picked out a location and photographer and they've given a second set of eyes to bridesmaid and wedding dresses. They've helped us choose invitations and tested out bridal shoes. So now it's time to give something back to them!

In honor and A&E's one year birthday (and inspired by Sylvia Weinstock), I decided to take on the mission of making the best birthday cakes ever!

Mission, I should say, is probably an understatement. Challenge. Uphill battle. Mount Everest-level adventure might be better terms. Because as my mother (and Eric) can attest: I am the world's worst baker! In my time, I have been known not to cream butter and sugar at the start of the recipe, with the result that the batter turns into a clumpy mess. I have left flour out of recipes. I have burned cookies made from Pillsbury roll out cookie dough, and put layered cakes into one pan instead of two. I have put olive oil in brownie mix (yuck) and flattened crumb cakes by adding too much crumb (seemed like a good idea at the time!). And, of course, I have forgotten to butter pans. Many, many pans.

In short, baking is not my thing.

But nonetheless, I was going to make A&E's one year birthday cakes! And given my track record, I knew I needed practice!

So yesterday, I began. The task: to solve the mystery of how fondant lies flat on a cake.

Eric went out and bought five pounds of white rolled fondant. I baked a Classic White Cake recipe courtesy of the Food Network (thanks Nick Malgieri). And you know what, I almost didn't make any mistakes! I took out two pans and immediately buttered them. I preheated the oven to the right temperature. I didn't start until the butter and eggs were at room temperature. I separated the eggs in a separate bowl. I went to add the milk and vanilla extract....

And then I accidentally added them to the butter and sugar instead of the milk.

Oops.

So of course then I manically tried to extricate the milk and extract from the sugar and butter. I can't say that it worked perfectly, but it didn't seem to damage the consistency fluffy butter-sugar combo. In a separate bowl, I dutifully added the flour, salt, and baking powder. And then I alternated mixing in the liquids with the flour (does anyone know why you have to do that?) I scooped everything into the two pans, baked, and after twenty five minutes, I had two absolutely beautiful cakes. I could have looked at them all night they were so perfectly colored (Oh, did I mention that they came right out when I turned them over?).

I waited for Eric to get home until we added the fondant on. As some of you may know, fondant has to have something to stick to. Oftentimes, it's buttercream but you can also make a glaze with jam if your cake doesn't have too many layers. Not wanting to take on too many challenges at once, we opted for the glaze, which involved boiling raspberry jam and spreading it onto the cake's surfaces.

Then we had to roll out the fondant, which came in a huge five pound package! We didn't use everything for this recipe (this was just test cake #1 after all), but we did use over a pound of it. First we kneaded it and then we rolled it out, careful, as the direction said, to turn it over frequently. As it got thinner, we had to wrap it around the rolling pin and flip it that way.

Of course, no one bothered to tell us that we needed powdered sugar to keep the fondant from sticking to the countertop/rolling pin, so we wound up using flour, which luckily didn't affect the taste or texture at all (it wouldn't be Danielle cooking without some adventure, right?)

When the fondant was rolled out enough, we wrapped it around the rolling pin (for easy transport and to avoid imprinting our fingers into it) and laid it onto the cake. Then we smoothed the sides down and luckily had only one little point where it crinkled up, which we were able to smooth over with our fingers (I'm not sure if that's the best way to do this, but it worked).

Then we took a pizza cutter, rolled it around the edges of the cake to cut off the excess fondant, and voila! A beautifully smooth fondanted cake!

Eric and I got creative with our extra fondant, crafting flowers (me), ribbon (Eric) and our initials (also Eric). When we were done, we knew that while we may have been practicing for A&E's first birthday cake, what we'd really made was our first wedding cake!

We had some for dessert while watching LOST last night, and even though it may not be of Sylvia Weinstock quality (I'm sure Sylvia would be appalled that I used fondant instead of buttercream), it was still a pretty sweet end to the day!



Me rolling fondant! See all the cards behind us? Those are all the awesome cards that you've sent to celebrate our engagement!



Eric rolling fondant! It turned out to be really stiff to roll, and so he took over and got it into shape!



The finished product!