“Bake Cake, Bitch!”

the trial run.

One of my best friends in the world is the lovely, fantastic Tiffany Whitten. She can bake a cake out of damn near anything, and the best part about her is that she taught herself the craft, and gets better with every cake she makes! Something I always say to her (usually via text), is “Bake cake, bitch!” as it relates to her new projects. When I needed a cheap idea for a birthday gift for my mother, I knew just who to ask.

Moms love anything their kids make, I think. I could have put together a cake that looked like Fudgie the Whale mixed with a steam roller and my mother likely would have been happy.. but I wanted it to be obvious that I worked hard on it, and wanted to make something awesome. So, I asked Tiffany. She told me that I could probably put something together for around three to five bucks, which was right in my price range! So I set off to get ingredients, and checked out her Zebra Cake Tutorial to figure out exactly how to do what I needed to. I had enough for two cakes, because I wanted to make a trial run first.

What I wanted to do was make a two-layer cake with filling between the layers. I had no idea how to do this, and baked a trial cake first, just to double-check. All I needed for this entire cake was 1 white box cake mix, 1 can of dessert filling (I chose raspberry), and 1 tub of frosting. That’s it!

pre-baked.

I followed the directions in the tutorial to a T both times, but the first cake I made didn’t ‘Zebra’ too well and wound up marbled, and the second cake had a case of the gangsta lean. By time I got to the second cake, though, everything went smoothly.

After baking, I pulled the cakes out (I used two 8″ round cake pans for the batter, for the two layers), and did the best I could to level them with a knife out of the free butcher’s block I received as a gift from (who else) my mother. Sure, the handles break off all the time, but this should be easy, right? Not. I made a huge mess leveling, but wound up with cakes that looked halfway edible. Following this, I did a cheap crumb coat with frosting and slapped a bunch of filling on top of the first cake, before plopping the first cake down on top of it. The first cake? Perfect. The second cake? Had the lean! Can’t do everything right.

the lean!

Once my kitchen was clean from the frosting and filling fiasco, I threw the cake in the fridge for an hour or so, and then proceeded to frost the outside. For as much hell as I went through to get the inside done, the outside was a breeze! After frosting, I put the cake back in the fridge while I built a cake board out of cardboard, packing tape, wrapping paper, and Saran wrap, and packed it up to bring to my mother’s house.

Long story short – I gained an incredible amount of admiration for someone I didn’t think could be any more awesome, and my mother got a birthday cake she loved. Though I had fun, I think I’ll stick to knitting and leave the cake-baking to Tiffany – she’s so damn good at it! And you can check her cake exploits out here.