Thursday, January 6, 2011

Happy 21st Birthday, Julia!

Today, the baby of the family, my younger sister Julia turned the big 2-1! I was excited and more than willing when she told me she wanted me to maker her birthday cake, rather than getting one of her favorite Red Velvet cakes from Maxie B's (local bakery which I will TOO often bring up). She even wanted my help in deciding on a cake to make, so we went with something new to us.

A 14 layer cake, yes that's 11 more than the traditional 3 layer cake. I had never tried one before or seen many recipes, but luckily I saved one a while back that I found on Bakerella. The recipe was originally The Smith Family's 12-Layer Cake. One important thing, this cake is just a tad bit time consuming... just a tad. If you feel like hangin' in the kitchen for an entire afternoon, make this.

This recipe made an insanely large amount of batter, so with just enough leftover I added a good luck layer to make it a solid 15 layer cake.


One thing that helped make this cake a little less time consuming was to use several 8'' round aluminum pans. They baked 3 at a time for about 12 minutes each, which comes out to an hour of total baking time. 


It would have helped to make the icing a little bit earlier, because the cakes were cooled completely not long after the hour of baking, but the icing sure took it's sweet time thickening to a spreadable consistency. 


It was a good idea to make another icing layer for the cake, as suggested by Bakerella, so I went with the chocolate cream cheese icing which made the cake look a little neater. 



When we finally cut into the cake after dinner, it definitely had a "wow" look to it, and tasted very moist! We were all so full from dinner so it was hard to finish such a massive slice of cake. Personally, I think most cakes  taste better the next day after being in the fridge, and this was no exception.

This cake was a lot of work, but it was well worth it!



The recipe I used can be found here (Smith Family's 12-Layer Cake), and instructions that I followed came from Bakerella.

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