Welcome to my New Blog!!!

Hi! This is my new blog and I am so glad you came for a visit. I have been baking and decorating cookies for a whopping 6 months. At least in a more serious way....or not. You may know me at The Cookie Basket because that's where I've been hanging out. I started out with good intentions....cookies, tips, tricks I've learned and wonderful cookie links. BUT then I took some cake decorating classes this summer and add that to some of the other posts I added to my cookie blog and I was even confusing myself. So here I am. Ready to post my cake journey for all the world to see...the good, the bad and yes, even sometimes (pleeze let it be more "some") the ugly.

Like this one

Let me just say that READING the directions and FOLLOWING them exactly is just a weeee bit important. You see, I did NOT.

It all started when my oldest grandson asked me to make him a white chocolate cake with strawberry filling and icing. Sounded great. Do I have a recipe already? Why, no! So, since Google is my friend, I Googled "White Chocolate Recipes" and found one like this one: click here. I could not believe...white chocolate with strawberry filling. But then something got hold of me....

Sift twice........3 cups cake flour

Looks the same to me...or did. How in the world could I do that? And I can tell you that 2 cups of flour instead of 3 DOES make a difference!

Let me show you what it looked like in the oven-

Deceiving

After READING the recipe AGAIN, I saw the error of my way and :) HaPpY DaY

(There's some missing pieces to this story, but I don't want to weigh ya down)

Anyway it would be enough to know that the dough and the cake tasted REALLY, REALLY GOOD!

So good that I almost made myself sick. Which made my disappointment even greater, because I couldn't get them to turn out of the pans in the normal way, even though everything was prepped like I always do (another story for another day)

Let me just close on this note: Icing, especially the yummy kind will cover a multitude of less than perfect layers. Look below.   (I forgot to tell you after the above fiascos that I baked again--two full recipes do make a lot of less than perfect 6 inch layers)  One was good, however, and one more ok; but  it left bits of itself in the pan like a child not wanting to get on the school bus on his first day---not a pretty site. But can you tell which cake has the less than perfect layer?
Take a closer peek!

and another....

Did you guess?

If you guessed the pink one was the well-behaved cake, then you were right.

Both are white chocolate cake layers, iced with Strawberry Swiss Meringue Buttercream and embellished with a royal icing lily, buttercream roses and shells.    The other misbehaved layers?  Well they did keep calling my name until I put their cooled masses in freezer bags for our unnamed "manna" desserts on another day.

I look forward to sharing my journey with you, but also look forward to hearing/learning from you as well. Have a great day...or night. Oven is off, lights going out. Maybe we can visit soon. I hope so!!!