The Anniversary Cake Project: I did it!

Additional installments of the Anniversary Cake Project:  lemon cake, lemon curd, lemon butter-cream icing

Ta-da!  Success!  I can hardly believe it!  I guess my Hermione Granger moments paid off, as all of my research really did help me create a tiered cake!

I brought the cake to my parent's church in the separate layers as you saw in the most recent post regarding the lemon butter-cream icing.  Here is a great trick for when you have to transport cake:  You know the shelf liner you can use in your kitchen shelves and drawers that is sort of foamy and comes in a roll?  I think a variety of brands make it.  Anyway, cut a square or strip of it and place it under whatever the cake is sitting in (a box or plate or whatever), so it is between the box and the car floor.  For example, I used many copy paper box lids for transport.  So, I put a piece in a box lid underneath the square cake board that held the 9-inch round cake.  Then I put another piece on the floor of my sister's trunk, and put the box lid on top of that.  Now the cake was safe from sliding around inside the box, and the box was safe from sliding around in the car!  All of my layers were carefully put into the car and we all said a bunch of prayers on the way to church!  Appropriate, right?

At church, I set everything out and took some deep breaths before attempting to stack the tiered cake.  I used a flat metal spatula, wiggled it under the cardboard circle under the 6-inch layer and gently placed it onto the center of the 8-inch square cake, right over the support straws.  I touched the cake a bit with my fingers but made sure it was at the very bottom where I planned to put the ribbons.  I did the same thing for the  4-inch layer.  When it was all stacked, I stood back and took some more deep breaths! 

I had prepared the satin ribbon in advance.  Since butter-cream is made mostly of butter and shortening, if it actually touched satin ribbon, it would leave ugly grease spots.  No good!  So I cut the ribbons to appropriate lengths for each layer, then used double-sided tape to stick waxed paper to the back.  The waxed paper was cut to be the exact width as the ribbon, 1 1/2 inches.  That took some work but it wasn't so bad.  I rolled up each ribbon, attached a little tag notating which cake layer it was for, and put them together in a little bag to bring to the church.  At church, I just had to unroll each ribbon, gently place it around the bottom of a cake layer, and pin it into place using a straight pin.

So far, so good.  Time for the roses.  I cut the stems of the roses I intended to stick into the cake very short and wrapped them in plastic wrap.  You don't want whatever liquids that are on the inside of a flower to get into the cake.  Then I stuck the stems into the cake to secure them.   For the roses that are on the tops of the cakes, I just cut the stem all of the way off and put a tiny square of plastic wrap under the bottom of the rose before sticking it into the icing on the cake.  They stayed put!

My sister and I!

I had my parents cut the first piece of cake together, just like they did 50 years prior.  Sorry for the blurry picture... I wasn't behind the camera and I have no idea what happened!

You might notice the green punch next to my dad.  That is known as Miller Punch.  My sister made up the recipe and we use it for all events where punch is offered!  It's a secret family recipe!  Don't tell anyone....

Miller Punch
2 small containers lime sherbet
1 2l bottle of lemon-lime soda
1 large can of frozen limeade concentrate
1/2 large can of frozen lemonade concentrate

Prepare limeade and lemonade using the lemon-lime soda to replace MOST of the water.  You might use a bit of water depending on how zippy you want it to be.  Scoop the lime sherbet into a punch bowl.  Pour the lemon-limeade over the sherbet and serve!

To mix things up a bit (or to get a pink punch if that is desired) you can also use raspberry sherbet and pink lemonade.  Also very yummy!
Printable Recipe

Back to the cake!  I estimate that there were about 60-70 people at my parent's reception and I miraculously made the right amount of cake!  I sliced the cakes into pieces about 1 inch wide and about 3-4 inches long.  I did not use the concentric circles method of cutting cakes.  I find that too tricky.  I just cut slices as if the round cakes were actually square, slicing off about an inch at a time.  I saved the top piece for my parents, so that was not consumed.  In the end, I had a little less than 1/2 of the 8-inch square cake left.  In my opinion, this turned out perfectly!  We could have fed a few more people but had enough to take home and have leftover cake a couple of times.  Phew!

Are you wondering about how the cake tasted?  Delicious!  I wished I had gotten it out of the refrigerator a little bit earlier, as the cake part wasn't quite at room temperature, but it was pretty close.  The cake had a great texture, very lemony and light, the curd had a good tang and the butter-cream was zippy!  If you didn't like lemon, this was the wrong party for you, that is for sure!  My sister and I joked that we were preventing scurvy in our guests!

I did freeze that top layer of cake for my parents.  I don't know how good it will turn out, but here is what I did:  I stuck the cake as-is into the freezer (without the roses, obviously)  to get it somewhat frozen before wrapping in any way.  After about 6 hours, I took it out and wrapped it 3 times in plastic wrap.  Then I stuck the cake into a freezer zip-lock bag and sucked the air out of the bag with a straw.  I put this bag into another freezer bag and used my straw trick again.  The point is to get as much air out of the bags as possible, as any extra air will dry out the cake.  Ideally, you should put the cake into some sort of box to protect it from other things in the freezer, but I could not find one.  My parents will just have to be careful in their freezer! 

I really can't believe how great these cakes turned out!  It was a great learning opportunity for me and I really enjoyed putting it all together.  Something to check off of my bucket list!

The Anniversary Cake Project: Lemon Butter-cream Icing

Additional installments of the Anniversary Cake Project:  lemon cake, lemon curd

With a lemon cake and lemon curd filling, it seemed natural that I should have lemon butter-cream icing.  Though I am a fan of Swiss meringue butter-cream, I chose not to use this for the anniversary cake project.   I did a traditional butter cream, with butter and shortening.  I based the recipe off of the Repressed Pastry Chef's Buttercream Dream Icing.  This is a great butter-cream recipe.  You might want to print it out because it is a good standby.  By the way, the cake in the photo above looks lopsided but it wasn't that way in person!

It is hard to figure out how much icing you might need to frost a cake.  I found some chart (I think it was Wilton) which indicated that for the sizes of cakes I was making, I would need to make 4 batches.  Each batch makes 4 cups of icing so that is a ton!  Above are the ingredients for 4 batches of icing.  Do you see the three bags of confectioner's sugar?  Yikes!

Anyway, I wanted to make the icing nice and zippy to go with the cake, so I added a teaspoon of lemon extract and 2 teaspoons of lemon zest to each batch.  It was delicious!

The Anniversary Cake Project: Lemon Curd

Additional installments of the Anniversary Cake Project:  lemon cake

Whew!  After baking 4 batches of cake, I went to bed and decided to work on the filling another day!  My dad just sat in the kitchen and watched his kitchen turn in to a bakery (his words) while the cake process was happening.  It really was a process and rest was needed before tackling another step!

Sugar and lemon peel in the mini-food processor

After some rest, I moved on to lemon curd!  I have a recipe for microwave lemon curd that I enjoy but I decided to try a stove-top lemon curd for this project.  Originally I thought I would only need to make one batch, but after making it once I decided I might as well make up another one.  It would be a real bummer if I ran out or had to do thin layers when the day comes to actually create these cakes, and is there such a thing as too much lemon curd?  I think not.  So, I made a second batch.

The Anniversary Cake Project: Lemon Cake

This summer my parents celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary!  FIFTY YEARS.  Over the past year, my sister and I have repetitively asked them what they would like to do to celebrate.  "Oh, nothing big" was the answer we kept getting.  They wanted to have a family vacation but not do it at the same time as the anniversary because that time would be too hot.  True, their anniversary is in August and there seems to be few places that time of year that aren't ungodly hot.  So what should we do to celebrate the actual day, if we do a family vacation?  "Oh, nothing" was the response we got.  Nothing?  Really?  Fifty years of marriage is a big deal!  "Would you like to have a reception at your church?  Cake and punch?".  "No, no bother."  Ugh.  After getting the same response again and again, my sister and I gave up.

Only half of the necessary butter!

Then, my in-laws planned their 50 year anniversary celebration.  Yes, both my parents and my husband's parents are celebrating their 50th anniversaries this year!  Isn't that crazy?  Anyway, I called my parents and told them that my in-laws planned their celebration for the first weekend in August.  "Oh", my parents said, "I guess that means you aren't coming here to celebrate our anniversary?"  WHAT??  Now they decided they would like a reception at church, with cake and punch.  That same reception idea that my sister and I have been asking them about for the past year, to which they have repetitively said "NO".  Ack!  Parents!  "It doesn't have to be a big deal", they said.  "We can order a cake from somewhere and have some punch".  Order a cake?  I had to think about this one.  Am I okay with ordering a cake?  In general, NO!  Especially not for an event like this!  I love to bake, for goodness sake!  However, I would be traveling for the week and a half leading up to their celebration, which is of course not in the city in which I live.  I thought about it and still came up with the same answer.  I just could not have a store-bought cake at my parent's wedding anniversary celebration.  Don't get me wrong.  I am not a total bakery snob.  I just could not allow a bakery cake to grace the table at this particular event.  If I could have figured out a way to make the cake for my in-law's celebration, I would have done theirs, too!