Monday, I set out to make a 3-layer cake. I love the cake book Sky High, and jump at any chance to make a fancy cake.

I started with the Gingerbread Beer cake – I found a fancy ‘porter’ beer, because that’s what the recipe recommended. I got out my 3 8″ cake pans (well, 2 8″ cake pans, and 1 8″ springform), and my beloved new KitchenAid mixer and went at it.

I realised that I had no parchment paper or even waxed paper in the house, so I just sprayed extra grease into the pans. Here are my 3 layers after getting them out of the pans:

On the first two I managed to scrape the stuck bits out of the pan and put them back on the cakes (with varying levels of success). The third one was so stuck I just ate those bits with a fork, and left the cake with a hole in it.

Because my friend is lactose-intolerant, I couldn’t do the tasty bittersweet chocolate & cream icing called for in the recipe. I looked through the book and found the ‘instant fudge frosting’ from a vanilla cake, and decided to use that. That frosting called for 6 tablespoons of half and half – I bought soy coffee creamer to use for that. I figured that 6 tablespoons was easier to substitute than the 1.5 cups called for in the other recipe!

That frosting, by the way? One of the easiest things ever. You just dump all the ingredients in to your food processor and process until smooth. That’s it.

My cake looks different, probably because I’m not a professional, but I like to think it is because I had a smaller tip than called for on my icing bag.

I thought myself very clever for covering a cutting board in tinfoil to put the cake on – I even remembered the paper strips around the edges so the board would stay clean. Then, I went to put the cake in the cake carrier:

Oops. Now what? The cake carrier is definitely the easiest way to transport cakes and cupcakes, plus I felt that I get to use it rarely enough that I damn well wanted to use it today.

In an amazing feat (undocumented because my hands were busy) I cut a 9″x9″ square from a cardboard box, unrolled the tinfoild from the edges of the cutting board, and slipped the cardboard under the cake, from under the foil. I got about halfway when I just started pushing the whole cake off the cutting board. At that point though, I could pull on the tinfoil to move the cake onto my nicely-size piece of cardboard. Wrapped the edges of the foil around that, and voila! No catastrophe!

Along with the pinwheel, this cake also has dino sprinkles. For the same friend’s birthday last year, I promised to make cake with dinosaur sprinkles. I thought it was a joke, but I actually found some at the grocery store, so I bought them. I wasn’t really thinking about how many dino sprinkles were in that container – every cake I make from now until eternity will have dino sprinkles.

A few weeks ago, we had a potluck at work. There was a sign-up sheet with various spaces to put down your name, with only two dessert spots. I immediately claimed one by putting ‘chocolate something’ on the list. Someone had already taken the first dessert spot with ‘carrot cake’, so I thought there should be some contrast.

As for what ‘chocolate something’ entailed, I wasn’t certain until I remembered a cake I’ve seen making the rounds. Baked bakery’s Sweet and Salty Chocolate Cake. The cookbook is on my Christmas list, but this recipe is on Martha Stewart’s website.

I wanted a challenge, and boy was this a challenge! A fun one though. I’d been wanting to make a layer cake for a while. I want to be the cake-baker among my friends, the one people come to for a cake. I figured to become that person, I better start baking cakes. So I went out and bought some cake pans. I had one 8″ pan, but this is a 3-layer cake after all!

I won’t repeat the recipe here, but I will tell you what I found out.

That recipe makes a lot of icing. They said the caramel would do a couple cakes, and the ganache recipe would do one. This is NOT true. I actually made two of these cakes; one was a test that I took to our D&D night a couple days before the potluck. It was a completely different set of people, so no one got bored by cake. One recipe of ganache completely iced both cakes. Granted, I don’t actually like icing on cakes, so I probably spread it thinner than the bakery does, but it would’ve been pretty overwhelming to have it all on one cake.

I needed two goes at the caramel, but that is more because my candy thermometer is a piece of junk. This I should know already, from my first adventure in cooking with Lester, on the fateful day we tried to make marshmallows. I have a feeling the caramel was supposed to be caramel-coloured rather than white, but I didn’t want to risk burning it again.

I also ended up buying a Cupcake Courier (seen in the background of the top photo). If I do want to be cake lady, I need some snazzy transport. I’m also very excited by all the cupcake blogs out there, and want to try some of those for treats to bring in to work.

The cakes were well received at both events, and provided great snacks at work for the next few days. You only need tiny, sliver-like slices of this cake, even with my stingy icing job. The salted caramel is great, it cuts the sickly-sweetness of all the chocolate in the ganache (an entire POUND!). I used a hodge-podge of baking chocolate squares, which I think worked out to 6oz dark, 8oz unsweetened, and 2oz bittersweet.

Definitely put it in the fridge before transporting. The first cake needed to go in the car as soon as I finished icing, and I actually ended up using skewers to pin the layers together so it wouldn’t slip apart. The second one had some time in the fridge (top photo) so it was good and sturdy. The Cupcake Courier worked well on my 15 minute walk to work. And I only got a few weird looks!