I bought this really cool pan where the cake ultimately ends up looking like a checker board. Cool, right?! Not! My mom requested a white cake with almond flavoring and a red velvet cake. Me being the overachiever that I am decided that I was going to make both of these cakes from scratch. If you know me at all, you know that I have a hard enough time making a grilled cheese sandwich. Nevertheless, I started my endeavor. Things proceeded fairly well until I got the the cooking temperature and time. The red velvet cake was to bake at 350* for like 25 minutes. The white cake at 325* for 20 minutes. Um, crap. I went with it. LOL. Needless to say, when I pulled the first take out of the oven, the white cake was starting to burn and the red velvet cake was not fully cooked. I didn't realize this at first, because my toothpicks (you know the way you are supposed to check if a cake is done or not) were clean. I left my cakes in the pan for 10 minutes, like I'm supposed to, and went I went to flip them over to the cooling rack, they fell apart. At this point, the clock had just struck 11 pm! Oh forget it, I went to bed. Here's what the cakes looked like BEFORE the oven. :-)
Oh! And while I was waiting on the cakes to bake, I cut out 20 daisies from white fondant, and rolled 10 centers for the middle of the daisies. More on this later...
Moving right along - quite possibly the longest post EVER! But anyways, so Saturday I was running some errands and one of them included the grocery store. While I was opposed to doing a boxed cake for my mom, I was running out of options. So I bought the boxed cakes. They both baked at roughly the same temperature for the same length of time. Home I went to bake some more! Here are the SECOND cakes after being removed from the oven.
Sunday morning, I wake up and decide to go ahead and put a layer of icing on my cake, known as a crumb coating. Um - the only thing this layer did was BRING OUT MORE CRUMBS! The harder I tried to prevent crumbs, the more the crumbs the cake had. After getting the cake iced, it was too freaking humid (or something) but my fondant daisies would not stick to the cake, no matter how hard I tried. I tried gum paste glue, I tried just pushing them basically all the way into the icing, nothing worked. I assume it was because I didn't let my flowers dry enough or something, because I tried to finish them Saturday and put them on my cake Sunday. I don't know what was wrong. But anyways, so to plan B I went.
I finally just put the words "Happy Mother's Day" and four very basic Wilton Roses on the cake, complete with green leaves. I have these imprint things that I imprinted to the side of the cake, but I don't feel like they turned out quite how I wanted them to turn out. In my defense, it was only my first time to use them. Anyways - without further adieu, here is my horrible, no good, very bad Mother's Day cake. In the end, it turned out okay, and I'm really loving the "checker board" cake.
