Graduation Season Part I: The Graduation Cake

This is a two-part series. I recently made a massive graduation cake and in the coming days, I will be posting a whole lot of super cute graduation cupcakes!

So I have been talking this graduation cake up for quite some time now. You know... the one that needed to feed 100+ people and was going to be covered in beautiful golden fondant?

Well, there were a dew mishaps along the way. You see, I have a killer chocolate cake recipe... and I mean killer. This chocolate cake is so moist that it will make your taste buds think they've died and gone to heaven. I designed this recipe myself (after a lot of trial and error), but have used the recipe quite a few times since evolving it, so it has stood the test of time. Unfortunately however, I have never baked this recipe in a 12x18 inch pan. So ultimately what happened (to make a very long story... so very much shorter than it really was), my chocolate cake recipe uses an oil to achieve part of its moistness and because in this scenario I was using such a large pan and was therefore using a longer baking time... all the oil separated and sank to the bottom of the pan, leaving the top half of the cake mega fluffy and dry while the bottom half was more dense than a 90 lb pound cake, yuck!

So in the end, I used a different recipe - one that was far less moist and far less chocolaty - the new recipe was more of a generic type that not even my cat could mess up if she had thumbs. Since I was using a dry cake recipe, I decided to ditch the plans of draping this cake with fondant (since fondant is really only good on a moist cake) and decided to use my buttercream recipe instead.

The graduate requested that this cake be marble so for each pan, I made two batches of chocolate cake and a quarter batch of the yellow cake. Then, it was dollop time!

Followed by swirl time!

Oh yes, and I used a TON of eggs! (and butter... of course)

The baking time for this cake was an hour... so with the weather being in the balmy 90's, I was in one hot apartment!

It took three 12x13 inch pans to assemble this cake.

After baking the cakes, I arranged them onto a large wooden board covered with foil and plastic wrap to make it pretty. Once the cake was covered in orange buttercream, I wrapped a 1-5/8 inch black ribbon around the border to tie in the school colors (black and gold) and to make the buttercream look less sloppy (after all, I had my mind set on fondant, so I struggled to comprehend that the buttercream was going to give the cake less of an elegant effect and more of a "I want to eat this cake right now" effect).

And of course, no job is ever finished until it has been attacked with cake pops...

(and no, those are not peanut butter cups, I used a candy mold to make the ridges and there's chocolate cake when you bite through the chocolate)

Then after using chocolate to glue the chocolate tops to the chocolate bottoms...

...and some lemon licorice tassels...

The graduation cap cake pops were finished!

Then since this graduate is a track and cross country athlete, I drew each sport's symbol in dark chocolate. Below is the track symbol and you can see the cross country symbol in the last picture of this post.

Lastly, I baked an extra chocolaty mini cake for the graduate. His favorite cake is dark chocolate. All of the cake that I had made up until this point was marble since that's something more people at his party would like. I figured that since this graduate was willing to sacrifice getting his favorite cake at his own party, I could make him a personal, extra moist, extra chocolaty cake.

Once I stuck the cake pops into this cake, it really looked nice. Everything pulled together and everyone was happy with the results.

Congratulations Andrew!

The Start of a Cake Pop Romance

Time for a reunion! With summer drawing closer and closer every day, I am antsy to get back to my kitchen. I have some fun experiments and tasks ahead, so I suggest you grab on for the ride!

Wayy back when, in February actually, my friend Anna had a birthday. Luckily, I am better at making sweets and getting them to my friends on their birthday than I am about telling you about those sweets on time! I am currently finishing my last semester of college and therefore am in a house with a bunch of nuts-o people who are really good are talking like valley girls and never turning lights off (currently, one of them is confused by how the microwave burned her popcorn) Don't worry honey, small and easy steps, you are smarter than the microwave!!?

This is all besides the point though. My friend Anna, she had a birthday. I made these delicious cake bites and a mini cake...

Cute huh? I actually got the cake recipe from my sister. Genius idea. The cake bites surrounding the mini cake were so good that the owner of the five-star restaurant actually wanted my recipe! hmm, leverage... this is good when there's food and wine involved! The recipe is originally from Bakerella, the cake pop queen. Basically, you buy a bag of Oreos, eat seven, crumble the rest and pour them into a large mixing bowl, then mix and mash 8oz of cream cheese in with the oreos until you have a chocolaty heap of deliciousness, and then form into balls, cool and dip.

Anyway that was February, this is May. The beginning of a new month! A glorious month I might add; I will graduate in May and can't wait to get back to the cities where my boyfriend, cat, and kitchen await me... another summer of homemade bread is just around the corner, I can smell it.

I had the opportunity to get a brief glimpse of summer recently while away from my studies for the weekend... I made cake pops! -and it was a success I might add, thank you very much (my first attempt at cake pops was a complete flop, check out my first post). The difference is that I tried to make the pops without Bakerella's Cake Pops book, now I have a copy. I recommend you don't try this without the book, it's bad for your self esteem and anyone near you.

I chose the color "orchid" for my candy coating. I thought it was fitting. The cake is a vanilla funfetti (yes, I used a box cake, I was ashamed to even walk up the the register with it. But it's what Bakerella recommends on your first try, so I followed command and look what I made! Proof that Bakerella knows best. There's also vanilla buttercream frosting mixed in with the cake - that's how you are able to form the round cake ball. Super tasty but not the best aesthetically. I was curious if the funfetti sprinkles would still show up after i created the cake balls... they don't. You just end up with a brownish vanilla cake. Oh well, I tried.

So these orchid-colored cake pops are my tribute to the almost-start of summer. Yay! I am anxious to jump into some of the more complex cake pop designs, so stay tunned for that!

Also, I have been working on my cake decorating skills and am anxious to put them to the test in a month when I will be making a massive high school graduation cake! The designing is currently under wraps. I can guarantee that it will be awesome though so stay tunned as i will be doing some test runs on the fondant (yes, I am braving that road again!) now that I have glucose syrup and glycerin.