Chocolate demo and wedding cakes

Kace came to school two Friday's in a row to make a wedding cake for her friend. The first Friday she was there, she started the day by doing a chocolate demo for the high school class and whoever of my class wanted to watch.

Tempering the chocolate:

Filling her truffle molds:

Explaining what she was doing:

Rolling some truffles:


After the demo we both headed into the kitchen to start baking her friends wedding cake and 150 cupcakes. The plan was to make a devil's food sheet cake to be the grooms cake. I guess he wanted a giraffe with a superman badge on his chest and when you cut off his neck, it will look like it's bleeding when raspberry coulis comes pouring out. The actual wedding cake is a 2 tier lemon cake with a raspberry mousse filling and then we are going to have 150 cupcakes as well.

We started with the devils food sheet cake, everything seemed to go pretty well without a problem. That's surprising as I stink at baking ... I was super nervous to actually have to make a wedding cake for some girl I don't know. The only reason I thought I would be fine is because I would have Kacean do all the actual baking.

When the devils food was finished we started on the lemon cake. We were going to be using a gold cake recipe of Rex's that she had never made before and just adding lemon flavoring to it.

We had decided to do a double batch to make sure we had enough for the 2 tier cake as well as 150 cupcakes, so I weighed out 10 pounds of flour and 7 pounds of shortening and put it in the biggest mixer we have.

Our giant mixer:

Once I had the flour and shortening in the mixing bowl Kace asked me to turn it on speed 1 and just mix the two together for 4 minutes. In the back of the room, we have the same mixer just smaller and the settings are backwards. The ball on the arm is facing away from the number, and in the front on the huge mixer, I guess it's the other way around. I set the mixer to what I thought was speed 1, which ended up actually being speed 4.


I pushed start and there was a huge cloud of flour that came flying out of the mixer and covered me from head to foot and made probably a circle that went at least 5 feet out from me on both sides. I looked up at Kace and Adrienne and we all just started laughing. After we all stopped laughing, I ran to get the broom and get it swept up before Rex came over and saw it and started teasing me about it.
As soon as I put the broom away, he came over. Good timing. :)

We ended up getting all the cakes baked, and the lemon cake was delicious! We packaged it all up and put it into the freezer to wait until the next Friday when we would decorate them.

The following Friday she came back and we worked on cutting out the giraffe and assembling the actual cake. We had a few disasters and rough moments, but it came together and it looked good at the wedding and the bride liked it. That's what matters.

Here are some pictures of Kace and I hanging out in the kitchen after lots of stress.
She's cute and I had a good time hanging out with her at school.


Goofing around:


Here are a couple pictures of the finished cakes set up at the wedding.

Here's the grooms cake all set up at the wedding. It turned out really cute.

And here is her two tiered lemon cake with raspberry mousse. The flowers and the top two butterflies are made out of modeling chocolate so they were completely edible.

And here are the lemon cupcakes with raspberry butter cream and a small modeling chocolate flower on top.