Making Cake

We just celebrated Kate's 1st birthday! 

She is quite the interesting personality...very stoic and hard to impress. She likes to hang out and do her own thing, and is not nearly as clingy as some of the girls have been. Her current favorite activity is to drop things into my boots when I'm not watching. (Thus causing me to shriek in alarm when I put them on and touch a small object with my foot that might be a snake or a scorpion, but in reality is merely a crayon.)

My big project for her birthday was making a cake for it. I want to volunteer to make my cousin's wedding cake in a couple months, because I like that sort of thing, but I've never made a three-tier cake before. I wanted to see if I could actually make one that looked good, and also how far in advance I could make it, what flavors of cake and icing to use, if I could freeze cake in entire tiers, etc. Logistics, basically.

I'm calling this my prototype--it turned out structurally sound, level, and tasting great, but there are a few things I would do differently next time for the decorating. I would stick with store-brand shortening for the icing--the texture was a lot better before I ran out and switched to Crisco brand. I would decorate the cake only one day in advance rather than two. The cake kind of settled and got some weird lines in the icing the longer it sat. I would also use a smaller decorating tip--I didn't get the precision I wanted for my mendhi-inspired designs. Overall I was pleased though.

Next up, trying my hand at this "refreshing jeweled flan" I found in a cake magazine from 1987. I plan to be crowned the queen of the Utah potluck,