Weddingbee boards

As a lot of you know, today was my very first attempt at a tiered cake trial. It was a little smaller scale than what I plan to do for the actual wedding (and even that won't be to feed all our guests, I want to do a "cake buffet" with many different cakes) but I wanted to get a feel for using dowels, buttercream, etc. 

So I thought I'd go through this step by step just because I know there's a few other people on here planning cake trials and it's definitely a trial and error process! 

My bottom tier was a hazelnut brown butter cake, a la Smitten Kitchen. 

If you've never had it, hazelnut brown butter cake is delicious. You start with a vanilla bean

Then you brown butter by cooking the vanilla bean in with it. This made our apartment smell so good it's ridiculous!

When the cake came out of the oven, it looked like this - so tempting! 

It always helps to have a little helper - in this case I had Zoey. :)

I then made a chocolate cake for the top tier, which was fairly straightforward. After that, I moved onto the buttercream. I was really nervous about this because I've only used simple buttercream recipes before, but it was easy! 

As you can see in the picture, I decided wine was necessary for this day-long feat!

Mmm, look at that buttercream: 

At this point, my photo quality gets progressively worse! I started baking at about 1:30, but after numerous dishwash cycles and lots of hand washing, it was dark and the view from my window looked like this: 

So the pictures are few and far between from here... but I made the ganache and then assembled the cake. Confession: I didn't use a "real" ganache recipe, but rather Robert Linx's chocolate tart filling recipe. It hardens to a wonderfully dark and slightly fudgy consistency, and went beautifully with both the hazelnut and the chocolate layers. I'm saving fruit for when it's in season! 

So the next step I photographed was.... 

Ta da! It's nowhere near perfect - it's not leveled because I couldn't find my leveler, the cardboard bottom is for a larger size and I was too lazy to cut it down, and by the time I got around to frosting it I was just cursing myself for not splitting this project into two days. But I deem it enough of a success that there will be further cake trials!

Thanks! Haha, I know the decorating's nothing great, but I plan to make the cakes a day or two ahead next time... I get impatient with all-day projects!

Yesss.... it was so good! I loved the hazelnut with the ganache especially. R dug right into it as guys tend to do. :) 

I like the rustic look too, and it really fits with our first choice venue. Fondant just would have looked ridiculous there (it's a loft style artifact retail shop) so I'm definitely not going for perfect - but I will go for level of course!

I'm hoping to! The plan right now is to make a moderately sized tiered cake that's traditional buttercream, and then to do a few different layer cakes that I can make the week before and do a "cake buffet" type of thing. That way I can still make everything, but not have to deal with a wedding cake big enough to feed 175 people. 

I went through a long decision making process here and after all the great tips decided to go for it. I figure I have plenty of time to play around. My FI is already begging for a tiered cake as his birthday cake after the trial today, so there will be more flavors and fillings to experiment with in the future!

Aw, thanks, you bees are making me feel so good! <333

@stephie - you were smart about it! I knew i'd be on campus all day tomorrow, and I'm going out to ride my horse in the suburbs Wednesday, so I just got impatient and decided to do it all at once. What can I say... when I feel like cooking or baking, I tend to be impulsive over practical. 

@bearcub - yes, yes, a thousand times yes! Haha. I could not do it without freezing the layers. I actually followed a post over at Smitten Kitchen that mentioned you can freeze and re-whip buttercream as well, and I know for sure that my ganache can be frozen for a day or two since I used it for mass Christmas gifts this year. 

@Amaryllis - try it! It's not even meant to be a wedding cake, but it has the right texture for it and held up perfectly. It was also relatively simple to make, besides that skinning of the hazelnuts, which is hands down one of my least favorite activities ever, even after toasting in the oven. The recommended ganache was really simple, just heavy cream, coffee, and chocolate, but I much preferred the thicker ganache of the tart recipe. 

@whitesonnet - I have a confession... we don't have a proper icing spatula, only the crappy teflon/rubber ones which I refuse to use. So I used a combination of my hands, a knife, and very slightly dampened paper towels. (Plus a pastry bag, obviously.) 

You did a great job!

You bees are so awesome, these responses have made my morning. :)