Bridesmaid Baby Cakes- Take I

You may remember from some previous posts that I am hosting the bridesmaids' luncheon for my future sister-in-law, Brenna. You also may (or may not...it's ok. I don't blame you. Who can keep up with it all?) remember that I decided to make the baby bridesmaids cakes from Southern Living for dessert at the luncheon. I posted about them here.



My mom came over for a test run of making the baby cakes. The recipe called for Poppy Seed Cake. That sounded too time consuming and, well, just not as good as regular ole' cake. She brought over every cake baking/decorating item she had. I pulled out all of my stuff too. We started our test run with all of this (see below). We had parchment triangles, couplers, icing tips (numbers one, three, and sixteen), cake mixes, canned icing, powdered sugar, candy quick, whipping cream, cream cheese, white icing color, almond extract, vanilla extract, etc.





We decided that between us we had enough boxes of cake mix to use instead of making homemade cake. We pulled a Sandra Lee. You know, she hosts that show "Semi-homemade." Note: I seriously didn't know that show came on the air anymore. I just found out when I looked it up to make the link above. I thought they stopped making it years ago. That shows what I know. :)





In an ideal world all of the cake flavors would have been the same. Well, my little perfectionist self has come to terms with the fact that we don't live in an ideal world and that multiple cake flavors will be ok in the end. All of us girls at the luncheon can just taste each other's and swap. It'll be like trading desserts in the 3rd grade lunchroom. What fun!

We made vanilla cake, devil's food cake, and chocolate fudge cake. Here's the science behind our cake choices. We chose these because we had two boxes of each of these flavors. We were making the cakes on jelly roll pans and had to double the recipe to make two sheet cakes of each flavor on two jelly rolls pans. We needed enough to have two layers of cake. Each cake will be decorated with each attendee's monogram. (Brenna, do you know who likes what kind of cake? I can monogram accordingly to minimize the cake swapping.)


And we were off. First we made two white cakes. While those were baking, we mixed together the devil's food cakes and started on the icing.

All of these pictures were taken on Judd's iphone. The photo quality is not great but you get the idea. If you don't have a seizure and/or your eyes don't cross from looking at it (it's blurry y'all. sorry.) the photograph below is of me making the icing. I used the butter cream frosting recipe found in Southern Living. You can get the full recipe in that link to the previous post at the top. The frosting calls for 2 lbs. of powdered sugar (make sure to sift it first), 1 cup of butter, 1/2 cup of whipping cream, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 2 teaspoons vanilla extract and 1 teaspoon almond extract.

Now Vanna...oops I mean Momma...show them what they've won...er...I mean made.

The cakes will look like this when you take them out of the oven. Your Momma might not look like this and she might not stand like Vanna White, but the cakes will definitely look like this.

I purchased a scalloped edged cookie cutter from Hobby Lobby for .99 cents. It most resembled the one Southern Living used. We cut out the vanilla cakes first once they had had time to cool. Forgive the sweatpants and old sorority t-shirt. It's not 1950 y'all. I just don't know how June Cleaver managed in her kitchen in those heals and dresses. (Disclaimer-I don't know what is up with all of the TV references. I guess I'm just in a mood. Well, that and I couldn't resist that Vanna - Momma thing).

Here's June

Here's Me. Ha. When all three cake flavors had baked and cooled we topped the layers with the butter cream frosting and sandwiched them together. By this point it was getting pretty late. We didn't have it in us to attempt the poured fondant. Take II will happen tonight. I'll let you know how they turn out.

As we were cleaning up, the living vacuum walked in to help. By living vacuum I mean nearly 100 lb dog who will eat anything. I think he was disappointed because our adventure was pretty tidy and he didn't get many crumbs.

He hammed it up for the camera anyway though. I think he knew I was going to post this on the blog and that he should probably smile. Ok, maybe not.