Happy Saturday! Today I’m going to be diving into the weird world of cakes from my limited point of view. A few days ago, I showed you guys my second attempt at decorating a “fancy” cake for a family birthday. But I skipped talking about the first part of the cake making, and moved straight to the decorating. But today, I want to back up and show what happened along the way.

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They don’t look bad, right?! So I took them out of the oven, and set them next to the window to cool down. I checked on them after about 30 minutes to take them out of the pan. The first thing I noticed was the texture of the top of the cake. It was sort of bubbly and “discolored”. Kind of like the top of the cake was wet, and then dried out. I think it has to do with the moisture that was accumulating in the oven from the strips, and the fact that it was concentrating in the middle of the cake.

Either way, I didn’t see a reason to worry. I removed the cakes from the pans and let them finish cooling on wire racks. When I went back about an hour later, I noticed another problem. The cakes were…slanted. There is the slightest chance that my oven is not level. This apartment building is pretty old, but I’ve never had problem before, so I doubt we can blame it on that. Check out this slant: Pretty incredible, right?!

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I got the cake strips off of Amazon. They were fairly inexpensive for four strips. Maybe one of you will feel like experimenting and see if you have any better luck. I read a few forums on other people’s blogs to see if anyone else had these issues. A few people had the same problem with slanted cakes. And most said that they stopped using the strips. I don’t want to give up on them though. I’ll have a round three and bake one cake at a time in the oven to see if that helps.

So moving on, of course I just leveled the cakes like before and went about my business. My intention was to make a “naked cake”. However, after leveling the cakes, and then adding the buttercream to the two layers, I saw that the sides of the cakes were starting to crumble. The only way I could figure out to counter this problem, was to keep adding frosting to those areas in order to keep the cake in. By the time I was done, it was only a partially naked cake. It looked like I ran out of frosting instead of intentionally leaving the sides bare.

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This side of the cake turned out almost alright. I was able to spread the frosting over this side of the cake without ripping off pieces of the cake itself.

I asked a few of my baking friends about this issue. One big solution is to freeze the cake after the cake is baked and cooled. Then, when you’re ready to decorate the cake, you let it thaw, not completely though, and then begin decorating. I’ll definitely have to try this next time. Regardless, this cake turned out cute and tasted great. Do any of you have any tips for cake making up your sleeves?! I could use a few pointers! -Jen

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