i volunteered to make marci and craig’s wedding cake! marci is cameron’s cousin, and she’s getting married in august. she originally wasn’t planning on having a cake, so i volunteered to do it because… it sounded like fun!

anyway, i bought this GREAT book called wedding cakes you can make by dede wilson. she covers every aspect of making a wedding cake, and most importantly, taste is top priority. so i bought a bunch of cool equipment i decided to make the basic vanilla cake since it’s my first cake. anyway, she recommends making a 6″ test cake, so I made that last week or marci’s wedding shower. mrs. taketa helped me a bunch with assembling this first cake, since she used to do some cake decorating.

so first i made the buttercream earlier in the week since it can be refrigerated for a week, frozen for a month. look at my shiny new mixer!

she’s so beautiful, and i bought a matching red spatula. i think i should name my mixer. cameron suggested “missy” but i am not feeling it. for the buttercream, it starts off as a meringue, and then you add some hot syrup, then the butter after it cools, and finally a little vanilla. i actually added 2 sticks extra of butter because i’m bad at reading directions… but it was still tasty.

then i made the yellow cake. i messed up the first time and overmixed it so it was too dense. i made it again, and it was okay. then the cutting/assembling!

making the cake smooth is really hard, but dede had lots of good tips. and my nice new rotating cake stand was helpful. anyway, here’s the finished cake:

i didn’t put moistening syrup in this one, but for the real one i definitely will because even this small cake started getting a little dry. the cake and buttercream tasted really good though. not overly sweet like a lot of cakes. look at the pretty layers:

it was a lot of work making this little cake, but i’m really excited about the wedding cake!