Project Wedding Cakery

I talked briefly about wedding cakes here.

Since then, I've mentioned it a time or two but I didn't really go into any details.  I was consumed with invitations and The Dress.

I finally have that mostly sorted.  So you know what that means don't you friends?

CAKE TRIALS! 

(so awesome!)

All Images are Mine

This weekend while Wes was at work, the Kid and I whipped up a dozen cupcakes.  I wanted to test two cake recipes and two buttercream frosting recipes without actually making two full-sized cakes.  Here they are . . . yeah-gotta work on the frosting thing.  Also-instructions from Baking 911 were invaluable.  I am not a cupcake baker by any means and the last batch I made was seriously, seriously mutated looking.  They have excellent advice here that results in flatter tops and neater looking cupcakes.

Anyway, we have a chocolate bacon cake with chocolate buttercream (yes, bacon) and a cream cheese poundcake with vanilla buttercream.  I made both of these buttercreams with mostly butter by the way-I added some shortening to thicken it up and even out the texture but that was beceause I ran out of butter.  Yeah-I'm a effing professional over here.

It's official, everything's better with chocolate.  The Kid, who doesn't like anything and is suspicious of pretty much everything that isn't fried loved the chocolate bacon cupcake.  He smacked it down and not even crumbs were left.  Amazing.  Even Wes, who doesn't like chocolate (I KNOW!) liked that cupcake.  He also liked the cream cheese pound cake.

As I am not all about the cake in general I was satisfied to declare winners.  Our two tiers will be chocolate bacon and cream cheese poundcake.

Let's talk about frosting for a minute. . .

We really liked the chocolate buttercream recipe that we used.  It wasn't super sweet-it had a milder chocolatey flavor-but something about it really complemented the darker, deeper chocolate of the cake.  We are definitely content with that one.

The vanilla buttercream . .  was vanilla.  It was kind of boring.  It was still good, but I think we need a little something more.

I think my next trial will be all about fillings and frosting flavors.

Stay tuned for more wedding cakery.  I still have to practice decorating . . . so . . . that should be entertaining for everyone involved, lol.