I love cake, OMG!
For a while now I have been wanting to make Dorie Greenspan's Perfect Party Cake, from her totally kickass book "Baking From My Home to Yours", because it looks absolutely scrumptious! This would obviously be the occasion for a perfect party cake.
Boy oh boy, does this cake call for a lot of egg whites! In my opinion, that is a very fine thing indeed, as it leaves muchos egg yolks for future baking endeavors!
I thought the most difficult part would be cutting the 2 baked cakes in half to form 4 layers, but it wasn't really that bad. Even if you do mess it up, you can still just layer all of the deformed layers on top of each other, and no one will probably notice as it is inside of the cake.
The hardest, most frustrating part of making this cake was the decorating/icing. I have since learned a few tips that I would most definitely employ in my next attempt which would more than likely eliminate any reason for huffing and puffing, and can't wait to try them out!
To make this cake, you place one cake layer down, cover it with jam (I used seedless raspberry), then cover the jam with the buttercream icing. Um, excuse me! Every time I tried to smear the buttercream over the jam, it just slid around on top of it instead of spreading properly. Sheesh! Talk about annoying. Next time, I will make sure the buttercream is VERY room temperature, which should make it much easier to spread.
Eventually I got all the layers on, and started to ice the outside of the cake. Whoa, hold up! This thing is full of crumbs, it's hideous! Since then, I have learned to smear a thin layer of icing all over the cake (a crumb coating, I believe it is called), then to refrigerate the whole thing for an hour or so. Then it should be much easier to layer on a thicker layer of pristine, perfect icing without any crumbs getting in.
I wanted to use raspberries to decorate the top, to match the jam flavor inside, but all the raspberries I could find looked really gross, so I went with strawberries instead. If you are planning to serve this cake the day you make it, you can even layer cut berries inside of the cake layers.
All in all, everyone said this cake was good, even though I wasn't too sure. I think my issue was with the buttercream icing. The cake really, really, really should have been brought to room temperature before serving, but alas, time constraints dictated a cold cake. That led me to feel like the icing was just pure butter, which I thought was kind of gross.
With all of the cake recipes out there, I am not entirely sure if I would make this one again. I think once I make a few other kinds of cake to see what I like and what kinds there are, perhaps I would come back to this one. The actual cake parts were delicious, I can see myself trying them with a different kind of icing someday. Despite my problems with taste and texture, this cake sure did turn out gorgeous!
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