i recently had a barrage of cake orders. a barrage, i tell you.
really, i only had three, but i’m still always slightly stressed out about each and every cake, so this was all i thought about for a few weeks.
firstly, my pal heather, whose daughters my girls adore, requested a graduation cake for her daughter. she ordered 20+ serving, red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting, decorated with rosettes, gold sprinkles, and a paper graduation cap.
allow me to walk you through the process….
there was a bit of drama between the “nice smooth coating” photo and the “rosetted” photos above. i had made the cream cheese frosting batches a few days in advance and refrigerated them. i brought it to room temp to do the stacking, crumb coating, and base layer of frosting, and everything was fine. i refrigerated it again over night, to be safe, before bringing it back to room temp to do the rosettes. this is where things went off the rails.
the frosting was much gloopier than the day before. i had to scrape off the saggy rosettes and start over. i cranked up the AC in the house. popped the frosting in the fridge a bit and tried again. nope. scraped off again. mixed in some more sugar and some meringue powder and tried once more. not a chance. but this time, i when i was scraping off rosettes, i caught some of the red velvet mixed in and couldn’t reuse much of the scraped frosting.
now i realized that i might not have enough, even if i could salvage the gloopy frosting. thankfully, i had enough cream cheese to make up two more batches of frosting. so, that’s what i did. they came out perfectly. fifteen minutes later, the cake was covered in rosettes and back in the fridge to chill. sigh of relief.
while it was in the fridge, i applied the gold sprinkles and non-pareils. (i may or may not have conducted an experiment to test the bleeding qualities of the various sprinkles given differently temperatured frostings. i concluded that sprinkles applied to refrigerated frosting that remained refrigerated could last up to 24 hours without bleeding.)
just before delivery, i took a quick pic with the paper hat (made for less than $2 from card stock, embroidery floss, and a hot glue gun), but i was super nervous about keeping the cake as chilled as possible. the rosettes were heavy and wanted nothing more than to slide off the sides of the cake.
for the delivery, i cranked the AC up in my car, to what can only be described as walk in cooler temperatures. loaded the cake. wedged it in with 12 packs of sodas. and ever so slowly and carefully made my way to the meeting spot.
my friend was super happy with it and i’m so thankful. and it arrived safe and sound to her house and she graciously sent me several pics of it fully assembled, in it’s final destination.
also, a bonus photo with her lovely daughter, class of ’22 grad, juliana.
and. even better, everyone thought it was delicious. i mostly focus on decorations and end up with kids birthday cakes a lot, so i’m not usually too worried about flavor other than sugar on sugar on sugar, so i was relieved that the adults also liked this one. 🙂