Happy Sunday! I have been baking non stop for the last three days, pausing to only go to work and go to sleep. In preparation for a few up coming birthdays, I’ve been practicing baking cakes from scratch. This includes homemade cake, buttercream frosting, and homemade fondant. I’ve never made homemade fondant before, and have only made buttercream a few times, so I’m hella nervous. On Thursday night I decided to make a practice cake for the birthday this Sunday. As a practice cake, I used a box cake mix with the intention of making the actual birthday cake from scratch. The cake, buttercream frosting, and the fondant all came out perfectly.

 

Not bad for my first attempt, right? I learned a lot in that first attempt. Mainly that I needed to even out the buttercream frosting a little better and then even out the fondant more after applying to the cake. As far as piping icing on the fondant? I’m such a novice and have no idea what I’m doing. So that part needs A LOT of work. Also, apparently you are not supposed to refrigerate the finished cake, but leave it at room temperature. Oops. It still tasted good though.

So Friday night, I set out to make the actual birthday cake that will be served on Sunday at the party. I picked a recipe for homemade lemon cake with a raspberry buttercream frosting, and then fondant and more buttercream. Holy woof. I was tired from working and baking the night before, so my head was definitely not in the game. And it showed.

The cake itself came out beautifully. It tasted perfectly lemony and was very light and moist. Next came the buttercream. The recipe was pretty standard, but I decided to double it because the recipe from Thursday night was not enough. After doubling the recipe, I added in the correctly measured out raspberry jam for the frosting. After adding it, the frosting looked and tasted delicious. The recipe said that if you were not going to use the frosting right away, to put it in the fridge and then mix for a few seconds again before applying to the cake. Well, I was going to immediately frost the cake, so I didn’t worry about it so much.

However, I still needed to cut the tops of the cakes and that took some time. Afterwards, I added the frosting and stacked the cakes one at a time. I could tell that something wasn’t even with the cakes, but i had already frosted them, so nothing to do about it now but plow on ahead. I turned to start rolling out the fondant. The fondant was leftover from the night before, but I had wrapped it tightly in plastic wrap to keep it fresh. However, it was not rolling out well. I decided to scrap it and start over and make more.

But when I turned around to get more ingredients…my cake had literally melted and fallen apart! The top two layers slid off the cake and the buttercream frosting was liquefying! I brought my recipe back up on my phone and saw a footnote that more powdered sugar might be necessary to keep the frosting from being “too wet”. Bet you can guess what my frosting needed. *insert huge eye roll* Also, after placing the cakes back on top of each other, it was VERY apparent that I did not cut one of the layers very evenly. Woof. The whole cake was ruined and it was obvious that I needed to start over. AGAIN.

Well, at least the flavors were there. But I could not serve this. I ended up smashing it all together and refrigerating the mixture for future cake pops. (They’re halfway done at this point, so why not?) I started over on Saturday morning with a new cake. I’ll save those adventurous details for a future post!

Have you ever had some major baking fails with a deadline coming down the wire? Feel free to share! No judgments here! 😀 -Jen