Cake Day

My friend Amy makes cakes.

She's hardcore.

She has so many cake pans, she hasn't even used them all yet.

If you were to walk down the cake aisle in Michaels, Amy could say, "Yeah, I have that" to EVERYTHING there.

She's hardcore.

I said to Amy, "We should make a cake."

She said, "What kind of cake?"

I said, "Fancy."

This morning, Jack and I headed over to Amy's house to make our fancy cake. Little did we know that we would learn more tricks than a circus pony and that we would come away six hours later with a huge appreciation for all those special birthday cakes Mom made for me as a kid. (Thanks, Mom!)

Our cake was chocolate with a hint of espresso. In between each of the four layers was a layer of chocolate ganache topped with a salted caramel sauce. We finished it off with beautiful rose piping covering the entire cake. Sounds great, doesn't it!?!

At first, the ingredient list seemed a bit odd.

Caramel made out of sour cream, lemon juice, salt???

"Double, double toil and trouble; fire burn and caldron bubble."

Speaking of fire... we may have severely burned our first batch of caramel.

We may have had to go to the store and stock up for a repeat batch.

We'll just show the repeat.

Isn't it pretty?

And that ended up looking like this

White fluffy goodness

Chocolate Ganache, anyone?

So once we had all of the ingredients made, it was time to assemble the cake. I have never made a "fancy" cake before because

a) it's scary

b) I didn't have any of the fancy equipment

c) I was afraid of having to cut cake layers and make them perfectly straight.

Amy came to the rescue and taught me out to cut through the layers with dental floss, using toothpicks as a guide. Brilliant!

Here Amy is piping the ganache onto the bottom layer

And here you have it.

Chocolate cake topped with chocolate ganache and caramel sauce.

Repeat.

Whenever I try and frost a cake, I always get little bits of cake that come up.

Amy taught me to blob the frosting on and then push away from you, not pull.

Also, it helps to put down a "crumb coat" before you get serious about frosting.

The cake magician herself

Have you seen the cakes on Pinterest covered in beautiful roses? Amy had never done a cake like that, but decided to give it a go today. You should have seen this girl! I thought it would take forever, but before you could say, "Holy confection, batman," she had it finished.

Bottom layer of roses

And....voila!

The finished cake in all its glory.

It almost brings a tear to my eye.

It was so beautiful, we decided we couldn't eat it.

Well, at least until tomorrow.

Thank you, Amy!!!