My DIY Cake: Living the Dream

My original plan was to make the wedding cakes and icings a few days before our wedding, but I decided to take advantage of a holiday weekend and made them 2 weeks before instead. Best decision ever! The week of our wedding was really hectic with last minute projects and visiting with family.

I began with Anna Olson's rich vanilla cake recipe, which is enough for two 8" layers or about 8 cups of batter in total. I used the Wilton capacity guide to calculate that I would need 6 cups of batter for the three 6" layers and 18 cups for the three 9" layers and made triple Anna's recipe.

Success! This was the perfect amount of batter for cakes about 1.5" high. Be sure to smack your pans before baking to remove any air bubbles (I ended up with quite a few in the 9" layers.)

For the filling, I made one batch of Martha Stewart's strawberry swiss meringue buttercream and two batches of this vanilla buttercream. Everything got carefully wrapped and went into the freezer.

After defrosting the components in the fridge, it was time to start assembly the day before the wedding. I trimmed the cake layers as flat as possible and built each tier by putting the worst layer in the middle and the prettiest and flattest layer on the top. The 9" tier was built on a 10" cake board as that would be the base of the finished cake. America's Test Kitchen has an excellent step-by-step tutorial with lots of pictures.

The cake was iced in two steps. First, a crumb coat to seal in any crumbs and create an even foundation and then a thicker layer of icing to finish. I used a low turntable, a spatula and a bench scraper for a smooth finish. Be sure to chill your crumb coat for at least 30 minutes and get the cakes into the fridge whenever your icing becomes soft or difficult to work with.

  Maid of Honour K and Bridesmaid J kept me company with moral support during the process.

I chose a bead border for the cake that matched my cake stand perfectly. My inspiration pictures had more elaborate details on the sides of each tier, but I was running late for my manicure and kept it simple!

 For added stability, I used a pencil sharpener to make a point at the end of a 1/4" wooden dowel and twisted it down through the middle of the cake (the 6" tier sits on the cake board so you need the point to get through the cardboard). Mark your dowel, pull it out and cut to just below the level of icing. Then put it back into the cake and cover the hole with icing.

The cake safely spent the night before my wedding in the fridge. When I returned from hair and makeup in the early afternoon, all we had to do was move it to a large cardboard box with some non-slip shelf liner on the bottom for transportation.

I'm happy to report that the cake made it from my house to the reception venue with no problems and held up beautifully all night. And it was delicious!