Cake Tasting Party

*Warning! - This post will make you hungry and jealous and you will get mad at me for not being invited to the cake tasting party so do us both a favor and go eat something... get nice and full, then come back and read this blog.*

Are you back? Ok, read on...

I am making the wedding cake for my friends, Dave and Ellie's wedding in September. It will be my first wedding cake so it won't be super glamorous or anything but I just finished twelve weeks of cake decorating classes so I am feeling somewhat competent. My last cake decorating class was Tuesday night and for the finale we had to make a stacked cake. I decided to take advantage of the fact that I was going to make a couple of cakes and do a cake tasting party so the bride and groom to be can taste a few different flavor options for their cake.

One idea that I got off of Pinterest (my newest addiction) was using a slice of a tree trunk as a wedding cake stand. I love the idea of combining rustic elements with elegant ones and since Dave and Ellie want to get married under an old oak tree I thought it would be fitting. When I went to Idaho last weekend I made the stand. This was something that would be very difficult to do down here but very easy to do up there, so the timing of my bright idea worked out perfectly! Here is what I made:

I figured that if they didn't love it, I could still use it myself for entertaining. It would make a great cheese platter! In fact, I got to use it right away for the party. We had some cheese and crackers and fruit to start off the evening before getting to the grand finale of CAKE! And, I was right, it looked pretty cool.

Dave and Ellie actually do like it though, so it looks like we have a cake stand. As for the cakes, we tried four flavors: chocolate with raspberry mousse, red velvet, lemon with lemon cream filling, and vanilla bean.

The chocolate was the ultimate winner. It is my mom's signature chocolate cake recipe and it is so good. It is dense and fudgy and moist and mmmmmmm... The raspberry mousse was a nice filling as well, I loved the flavor combination of chocolate and raspberry. The red velvet was a close runner up. There is something about red velvet... it doesn't taste like anything in particular, just sweet nothing, but it is good. We eat with our eyes so I think a lot of its appeal is in its beauty, red cake is pretty. The lemon cake was unimpressive, it was a bit dry but I have made it before and thought it was really good, so I think this time I just baked it a bit too long. The vanilla was also kind of a let down. I keep trying to get vanilla to be really good. I scraped a whole vanilla bean and used some gourmet vanilla bean paste and everything! But no matter how much I try to "gourmet" it, at the end of the day, vanilla is just vanilla, plain and boring. Tyler really liked the vanilla cake, though. It wasn't bad, just wasn't anything to write home about. Vanilla got its boring reputation for a reason.

My cake decorating class was focussing on fondant so I covered one of the cakes in fondant and did the other in buttercream. Fondant is known for being kind of disgusting. I decided to make a homemade marshmallow fondant instead of using the pre-made stuff from the store. I hoped that might make it taste better because fondant can make a cake look really pretty. Well, homemade or not, the fondant was gross! I am nixing that idea because I want my cake to be remembered as tasting good, not covered in thick, sweet, play dough that people have to eat around. Anyway, here is my fondant cake with some gum paste roses on the top. I brushed the cake with pearl dust which makes it sparkle which is kind of fun:

The other cake I did square, just for variety. I used buttercream and wrapped a ribbon around each layer. You can do a lot of things with ribbons on cake and it is super easy! I put gum paste calla lilies on the top just because I had them from my class:

So anyway, there you have it, the cake tasting party was a success and I think we have some good flavors picked for the wedding. Now we just have to get together and nail down the design. Now, if you will excuse me, I saved myself a piece of red velvet cake and I think I will go have that for dinner!