Martha Stewart's White Wedding Cake and Buttercream

Earlier this week I took a crack at making a White Wedding Cake with a Buttercream, minus the Raspberry part. For the cake, I didn't pay attention to how much time it had been in the oven and kept opening and closing it. This affects the way it rises and it ended up like below. Ideally, you don't open it until you're checking for when it's done so I need to be more aware of the time it's been in the oven.

As you can see from the middle of the cake in the picture above, I poked it many times. The cracks are not the biggest deal because the cake needed levelling off anyway - see below - but I think the fluffiness of the cake was really affected by my constant opening of the oven. It ended up being really dense, will need to try again.

The buttercream was much more of a success and very yummy. I loved whipping it and watching it come together. As a note to myself, I did not put all the butter in, I stopped when it started churdling and then whipped it smooth. The texture was more managable doing it this way (compared to the frosting I made the following day, which "melted" a bit more).

So, when I bake, I have a focus. I am trying to master the art of cake making with the limited time that I have. With each attempt, I focus on item/step in the process. The focus in this was project was two fold: (i) on the actual cake was to get it fluffly, which I failed at, and (ii) the focus on the cream was to get the right consistency, and I think I was sucessful there. I did put a cake together for the sake of it and learnt some stuff on the way, but the end goal was not to make a perfect cake. And so it did not end up being the most pretty thing. lol Here's how it looked like as I put it together.

Added strawberries, piped on more frosting and added the top layer. It looks awesome at this point, I think.

Then the part where skills matter comes and this was not my focus today so I played around. It eneded up looking decent, no?

In the end, my mom and I tried it and we give a solid thumbs up to the frosting but a sold thumbs down to the cake. One, the bottom of the cake was too thick and difficult to cut into. It was very dense and a bit dry. I think it was all due to human error and so I am tempted to try the recipe again. There's two recipes that I've done that I need to retry now - and I've only tried about three so my success factor is not the greatest! Clearly a practice until perfect job. It's fun. It's costing me a bit of money but I am thoroughly enjoying myself. I need to find people to give my cakes to. Feel free to volunteer!