Red Velvet

In order to perpetuate my new-found love of decorating cakes, my friend let me make her a birthday cake (isn't she so nice?) ;) Her only request was red velvet. I've never made or eaten red velvet, so I searched for recipes and found a 5-star recipe on Cake Central (where else?) Do you know how much food coloring goes into a red velvet cake? THE WHOLE BOTTLE! Yikes!

I'm still having trouble with my new pan, though I love it. It's a tall 8", and I still am having trouble getting the time/temp right to cook the inside without burning the outside. The cake ended up ok (correct me if I'm wrong, Malisa), but I was getting nervous at the end.

I decided to make a 3-layer cake just to be fancy. And red velvet cake is *crumbly*! But I put on a crumb coat and it worked out ok. The icing wasn't smoothing down very well, so I got out my hand roller and tried that. It worked wonderful! What a great, easy way to smooth a cake. I impressed a diamond pattern on the side using a bamboo skewer (again, another good tip from Cake Central). It's not the original design I had in mind, but I like the way it turned out. I was going to add some more flowers on the side and top, but didn't like it when I started, so I took them off. My kids liked when I made mistakes, 'cuz they got to eat anything I scraped off. :)




Here's a close-up of the butterfly.


Ah, the butterfly. It's made of royal icing. I wanted to try something new, so this was my something new. Did you know royal icing breaks very easily? At least mine did. I made 4 butterfly wings, and they all broke. So I made 7 more. This time only one broke as I prepared the body. So I had 3 butterflies ready to go. I put one on the cake, and Eldon ate another (w/o permission) and broke the other one in the process. So I hoped and hoped that the butterfly wouldn't break in transport because I didn't have a backup. And it didn't. Wahoo!