Judie's Slice of Heaven

So I need to start off by saying a few different things.  First of all, my cakes take about 2 days to make them.  Not because I can't do it in one day.  I just find that it is easier on me to make the cakes and the icing and then decorate the following day.  One of these days I will have to bake, ice and decorate in one day.  But for now the two day thing works for me.  Secondly, it is so much fun to cook in someone else's kitchen.  I suppose one of the main things I like about it is that I don't have to clean it before I start baking.  (I think I just told on myself.)  This week has been really crazy and I knew that if I was going to have a cake for the Mother's Day Girl's Night that I was going to have to do it at my nanny gig.  Thankfully my step-sister has KitchenAid mixer.  (Yes, I nanny for family.  It is wonderful to see the little one so often!)  Anyway, back to the mixer.  Let me just say that it is pure, 100% heaven.  I'm not sure how I ever made anything without one.  I would love to have my very own by the time I'm making a tiered wedding cake.  But I'm not so sure that it is going to happen.  I was quite impressed at how quickly my eggs whipped up.  I like to turn my egg whites into a meringue before I mix in the rest of the other ingredients.  Overall, I went from the mix being in a box to having it in the pans in less time than it took me to clean up my mess.  Now, I know that I'm a messy baker....but still...it was wicked fast!  This was the first time that I had ever made a Red Velvet cake though.  For whatever reason, I wasn't expecting it to be as red as it was.  My fingers are still slightly stained from the mix and my icing!





I went with a different recipe for my icing.  It was a cream cheese and butter base.  And it was delightful!  I took tons of time whipping it.  (I'm starting to think that anything that has to do with baking is better when whipped.)  It was a little thicker than I had wanted so I thinned it out with some Heavy Whipping Cream.  I ended up with a delightful icing that could be used for so much more than just cakes.  I'm thinking that it would be wonderful with a fruit platter!  Since this was not a cake for class I thought it was ok to change it up.  I loaded it up with a layer of frosting, fresh strawberries and more frosting in between the layers.  I was quite concerned with the stability of the finished product.  I did run into a huge problem though.  The cake was so moist that it was sticking to my fingers.  And when I went to place the top layer, it crumbled.  So here I was in my own kitchen trying to figure out how to 'glue' the cake back together with icing.  This doesn't go over so well for a perfectionist.  Eventually, I had a dirty iced cake....



I did learn that this particular icing doesn't really crust over enough to do a lot of smoothing.  As much as I didn't want to just let it go and ignore all of the lines on the cake....I decided that I didn't want to chance the cake falling apart or getting crumbs in my icing.  I made some red-ish icing to do some decorating.  This whole process was a mess!  It didn't matter how much coloring I put in the icing, I simply couldn't get the right shade of red that I wanted.  (Mental note to self:  do some research on getting the proper dye for the shade of red that I want.)  Eventually it got close enough and I went to start on the cake.  The problem that I had at that point was that my hand was melting the icing before it even was on the cake.  Overall, it ended up looking pretty good.  The one thing that I will say is that the red icing was horrible!  I absolutely need to find another way to get red icing.  All of the coloring made the icing taste really biter!  This was not a good thing!  Judie loved the cake though and that is what makes all of the effort worth it.  Here is some pics of the final product. 

Enjoy!  And happy caking!