Cake!

It's my birthday today! Let's drool over these cake photos, ok?!

Over the weekend we celebrated my husband's grandma's 88th birthday! (February is a great month for birthdays, by the way!) I made her a cake and I wasn't planning on sharing it on the blog since I decided what I was going to do somewhat last minute, I didn't know how it was going to turn out, and I didn't take in process photos. Well, I ended up making the.best.cake. I have ever made and it got fantastic reviews! How could I not share that! It must have been all that butter, chocolate, and love.

I don't have in-process photos, but I'll share where I found my recipes and some techniques. It went so well that I thought it was too good to be true. The only thing was though, that I took far too many trips to the grocery store. It must be like how my dad says,  "it always takes 3 trips to the hardware store" when working on a project.

The cake was a marble cake made with 1 box of Duncan Hines French Vanilla cake mix and 1 box of Duncan Hines Dark Chocolate Fudge cake mix. I used 9 inch cake pans. I cut out parchment paper circles and made sure the pans were nice and greased up so that the cake came out without fuss. There was about 2.5 cups total batter per pan. I made 4 cake layers.

For the filling I made 2 batches of raspberry cream filling using a recipe from Une Gamine dans la Cuisine. I still have some leftover.

I found the dark chocolate frosting recipe on the blog, Bakeaholic. This frosting was so fantastic to work with. It worked well spreading it on and piping it on. I also love that it's not too sweet. The dark chocolate is a nice contrast to the very sweet raspberry filling. Beware, chocolate frosting some how gets everywhere! I made 4 batches and this was way way way too much!

There is a great tutorial on assembling a layer cake from the blog, Whisk Kid and then also one for doing a crumb coat and frosting your layer cake.

I got the inspiration for the piping from a cake seen in an anniversary party featured on the blog Oh Happy Day. As far as piping frosting goes, this is very easy to do. It didn't take too long and looks impressive! I used a Wilton #21 star tip. Start at the bottom of the cake making continuous clockwise circles/swirls going straight up the side of the cake, overlapping each one ever so slightly. Use consistent pressure and size. Sorry if this is hard to understand I don't have photos or video of it.

 My favorite part about making this cake was that Grandma was over the moon about it! It makes the time and energy put in to it so worth it :) It helps that everyone else loved it as well!

Cheers to birthdays and cake! Does anyone else have a February birthday?