(FYI This post was written 3 days ago. I still haven't😂😂🤦♀️🤦♀️😱😱💤💤😭😭 slept without waking up from jarring nightmares of cream cheese icing, melted chocolate and skew cake layers.
For those of you who are joining us for the 1st time and for those you have been following my red velvet experiment, I don't know why, but I have found this cake to be the most nerve wrecking yet.
Perhaps it's because it's Matthew's 13 birthday (making me feel the pressure and old AF 🤣🤦♀️) officially from 12am this morning, although he was actually born at 15h30 a whole 13 years ago. It feels like a lifetime ago, but I will never forget t feeling of staring into his deep blue eyes and tracing his little feet and hands and he breastfed in the hospital' , or how it felt to have him move in my tummy.
The last photo taken before I popped, almost a week early, with the help of an emergency C-section - and thank God because he was enormous!
Motherhood its truly such a blessing and although I find myself sweating the small stuff so often, I am really grateful for the family we have.
So, back to the cake, It has been a bit of a comedy of errors. Up until yesterday morning when I completed the first crumb coat, everything seemed to be going according to plan.
I suppose the pressure is also now really on, now that I am doing this to make a living so it has to look and taste 1500% perfect and then some!
Building and leveling the cake was terrifying, but reslly fun to ice, strangely enough. The icing was such a great consistency and I got o add lots of Oreo crumbs in-between layers!
By the end of the 2nd and third coat of icing, I realized I was going to run out of icing!
This was problem number one
In the meanwhile, managing to add the crushed Oreos and strategically saved crumbled red sponge as décor proved a little easier that I thought, although it was very messy and I ended up with a lot of it on the floor!
I was concerned that I was going to run out of cream cheese icing(which, as previously mentioned above I almost did) , and that I wouldn't have enough for the decorative rosettes.
So I went out and bought a whole bunch of white chocolate thinking I could make "cake pops" to replace the rosettes with the the left over icing once I was done with the 2nd and third coats. I have never made cake pops before, but since this was a cake of 1sts, I thought it was pretty brilliant until they fell apart in the chocolate. Try fishing cake out of melted chocolate. It is not nearly as fun as it sounds... So, not wanting to waste the white ganache and I had marbled with red food coloring... so beautifully 😭
I went back to plan A) and made it into ganache, adding the little bit of cream I had left over from the cake and buttercream icing.. I was unsure of what I would do with it... I mean, there's a thin layer between a classy drizzle and a murder scene when it comes to red food colouring, So I've been stuck, pondering how to use both icings, the cream cheese and the ganache, and it turns out that you CAN absolutely use both in the same piping bag to create a swirl effect.
I came across these a bunch of videos online showing me where I went wrong...( even though I put the neatly rolled cake pops into the freezer before dipping - they still fell apart) videos after the fact (typical 🤦♀️🤦♀️🙄🙄) and it turs out I was supposed to add ganache to the cake crumbs before making the balls, in order to make them stick together. We'd already gobbled them all by this stage and the only crumbs I have left where JUST enough for sprinkling. This was problem number two.
So, I wet back to plan a) which was to do blended white and red rosettes. Only now, I had the ganache icing to bulk up the dwindling amount of cream cheese icing I had left. It wouldn't have been enough. I wasn't sure though, if you could pipe ganache and buttercream at the same time, but it turns out that you can! It turned out beautifully on the top of the cake. The trick is, which I have not entirely mattered yet, is to make sure that the ganache is runny enough to load into the piping gun or bag but cool enough to not melt the buttercream icing - which I messed up at the base of the cake as the icing was to warm. I'm going to try to fix that with some raspberries or strawberries - whatever I can find as it's not really berry season here at all. I'd say that was a winner for me despite untidy base which I had good intentions to will but ran out of time fix...
Well, good Lord that's where I ran into my third round of disasters, as my piping guns and their bits and hidden all over the kitchen like Easter eggs. Sigh. I actually thought at some stage it might me clever and more precise to use the piping bag, but discovered that this was not washed properly after it's last use or dried it out and then to top it off, stuck it back into the special piping box (all damp and dank,) that I have for my sacred piping bag and nozzles , for Pride Month in June and had started growing mold!! omg! Eeeeew. Thank GOD I discovered that before piping. So back to the guns I went, but the "triggers are not working properly and although I'll get @zakludick to look at them, it may be time to just chuck them and get another set of piping bags. Lord knows I don't need nozzles. I have like 50 of them. I just need like 3 or four durable and reusable piping bags.
So were almost at the finishing line, with just a few more fixes and decorations, but I am still 100% certain that this is going to turn out to be one of my best cakes! At last! Making me feel the pride and pressure (and old AF 🤦♀️🤣)!
