One of my cousins, near and dear to my heart, Christina, is expecting! She and her husband Allen are some of the greatest people I know, obvi she is my cousin so she is undoubtedly amazing. When I found out she was expecting I almost fell out of my chair in excitement and all I wanted to ask her was if she would grant me the honor of making her a cake for her gender reveal. AND she said YES! I was so over the moon and really blessed to be able to be apart of their journey but in all honesty I was extremely nervous. She sent me a photo of what she wanted, a "Touchdowns or Tutus" theme and I have never everrr made a cake that mimics a picture before. Everything and anything you see on this blog is my own ideas in my brain and with the help of youtube and my husband whom I literally annoy every time I bake, layered cakes become my very own masterpieces. To say that I felt pressured is an understatement. Although I knew they would be grateful and happy no matter what, I really wanted to knock people out the ball park when they saw this cake. Needless to say, the cake turned out looking pretty great and most importantly they were extremely happy and loved the cake which made it all worth while. Tools: Electric stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment (a handheld on works great too!) Mixing Bowls Whisk Spatula Parchment Paper Cake pans (for this recipe I used 2 9x3 round pans and 2 7x3 round pans Kelly Green gel food color Ballet Slipper Pink gel food color Bench Scraper Offset spatula Since this is quite a lot of cake I had to double my Vanilla Cake recipe Vanilla Cake You'll need: 5 cups of All Purpose flour 4 cups of granulated sugar 5 tsp of baking powder 1 tsp of table salt 8 tsp pure vanilla extract 4 tsp orange blossom water 8 large eggs, at room temperature 2 cup of whole milk 2 cups (4 sticks) of unsalted butter, at room temperature American Buttercream: You'll need: 12 sticks or 3 cups unsalted butter, room temperature 3 2LB bags of powdered sugar 3 tsp (6 grams) salt 8 Tbsp (60 grams) heavy cream 6 tsp (12 grams) vanilla Split your buttercream into 2/3 and save the smaller portion to fill each cake layer The larger portion needs to be split into 2 one batched dyed in green and the other in pink! Toffee Filling/ Dulce de leche (Sourced from Serious Eats) You'll need: 1 (14-ounce) can of sweetened condensed milk, label removed To see how to do this and prep in advanced click here. Vanilla Cake: Preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Line your pans with parchment paper. Sift the flour, baking powder, and salt into a bowl and whisk together. Set it aside. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the butter, sugar, & vanilla on medium speed until the mixture looks fluffy. Add the eggs, two at a time, beating until each addition is well mixed. You can use your spatula now to scrape down the sides of the bowl, if necessary. Bake for 40 mins or until a toothpick inserted in the middle of the pan comes out clean. To make the American Buttercream: Beat the butter on a medium speed for 30 seconds with a paddle attachment, until smooth. Slowly add in the powdered sugar, 1 cup at a time. Alternate with small splashes of cream. Once fully mixed, add in the vanilla and salt, and beat on low until the ingredients are fully incorporated, and the desired consistency is reached. If the frosting is too thick, add in additional cream (1 teaspoon at a time). Leave a quarter of your buttercream white and split the remainder into 2. For this cake in particular it is important to have a little extra pink buttercream as the bottom tier is all tutus! Stacking and Layering: Once cakes have cooled completely , remove them from their pans and level the tops. Stack and fill your 9in and 7in cakes with American buttercream adding in hefty spoonfuls of that golden toffee/dulce d leche. Crumb coat your cakes with the plain white buttercream and chill for 20 minutes. I want to address the football field and the touchdown signs, I ordered these on Amazon. They are icing sheets and they were very easy to cut and attach to the cake. The top tier (7in stacked layers) is going to be your football field. For this I used a Wilton 1M tip. I used this on the sides. I used this to make smaller stars on the cake and used a toothpick to prick the ends and make it more grass-like. For the top I used the same green frosting only this time I used a zip lock bag and simply pricked the side of the bag with a toothpick, about 7-10 little holes and there you have it your very own grass tip! So easy and really shockingly good looking. For the bottom tier I was on the struggle bus! After lightly crumb coating my tier I realized that I needed to address the tutu. For this I bought a Russian piping tip #060 (see picture below) that really didn't work. The top half was very thin and as soon as I piped on a layer of ruffle it would immediately slid off. I scraped off and reapplied some more buttercream, smoothed it out and used a Wilton 104 petal tip. Hold the decorating bag at a 45° angle at 3:00 (9:00 for left-handed decorators), with wide end of tip lightly touching surface and narrow end facing down and away from the surface. you keep the wide end of the tip against the cake, move your wrist up to pull up the icing; move wrist down to complete one wave of the ruffle. This was fast and easy and really looked like ruffles. But I wanted more. When I completed the entire ruffle tier. I added some left over white buttercream to my pink buttercream and created a lighter shade. I then used the same 104 tip to create some dimension and unevenness resembling an actual tutu. Before stacking the cakes, I used 6 wooden dowels and marked them starting from the center out and around to support my top tier. Once the support was in it was finally time to add the sugar sheets onto my top tier. I simply cut and placed the sugar sheet evenly on the cake, filled in any holes using the Wilton 1M tip and carefully stacked the cakes.
On location I added a really great cake topper that said "Tutus or Touchdowns" and a sugar football and ballerina slipper that brought everything together! WARNING: This cake is HEAVY! I needed assistance moving this one into the fridge but man was it worth it. If all goes well, as always, leave a comment and let me know! ALSO! For those of you wondering if its Touchdowns or Tutus...IT'S TOUCHDOWNS <3
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December 2018
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