I headed over to Safeway to get 2.5 dozen eggs then back to the house to start baking. All told it was close to noon before the first double batch of cake (in a 14X14X2 square pan) went into the oven. Next batch was 2 rounds (8 inches). Since the cakes took about an hour in the oven for each batch and I wasn't great about making sure then next batch was ready to go in as the previous came out, I was on the 2nd 14X14 when LLT called to tell me that Cas was at the metro needing to be picked up.
Originally LLT was going to get Friday off but by the time she'd gotten the leave slip in there were already too many people in the area taking off. So she had to work but was going to try to get off early. In the way these things worked she ended up not getting off until after 4 so that's how I ended up having to go get Cas.
Before I left I asked our resident expert in the cake design to give me an opinion on how much more cake I needed to bake.
Finally LLT got home and took Cas off to Resturant Depot and Sams Club. I kept baking and eventually made it through all the cakes. I spent some time peeling some of the eggs I'd been boiling all day to go on the salad for Saturday. LLT and I had bought the eggs last weekend because old eggs boil peel more easily but for some reason these eggs sucked. I decided I was exhausted so lay down for a while before LLT got back. My mind wouldn't shut down so it ended up I just rested with my eyes closed.
When they got back we had chinese food for dinner and then I headed back upstairs to start making the frosting. I should say something about the frosting. I LOVE this stuff, it's my FAVORITE buttercream frosting. Someday I want to feed it to Perrin since he doesn't like buttercream and I want to see if he likes it. On the other hand it takes a full hour to make.
First you start off making a simple syrup with 3.5 cups of sugar with 3/4 cup of water. That needs to come to a soft ball stage at the same time the 13 egg whites you are whipping come to a soft peak stage. Once that happens you put the mixer on high and pour the sugar into the edge of the egg whites. That needs to whip for 30 minutes at which point you lower the mixer to medium and add 3 lbs of room temp butter cut up into pieces. That gets mixed for 10 minutes when you add six tablespoons of extract (in this case lemon) and beat for 5 more minutes. Yeah it takes a while but it's worth it. The good thing is since we have the 30 quart hobart we can do multiple batches at a time. It used to be we had to work in half batches because the recipe just won't fit in a kitchen aid.
Once the frosting was made (about 10:30) LLT and I started working on the base cake. We had originally planned on carving it and then covering it with fondant to make it look like a pillow. Based on the time and how much work we still had to do we decided that the base should just be frosted and that's it. Grrr if I'd known we were going to do that we could have stayed with one layer on that cake. Anyway since Emma's colors are green and gold we decided the base cake should be green. So I mixed some of the buttercream into a nice green shade while LLT crumb coated the cake. Then while she frosted the cake I started stacking the rounds with a layer of buttercream in between each one.
When the cake was carved to the right shape I put a layer of buttercream on it while LLT and Frederich started working on the Fondant. For each piece
By the time we finally got her to declare it done it was 2:30 am.
Don't you like how I managed to tell the story about the cake without actually saying what the cake design was? I'm kinda waiting for