In my last post about how we survived the longest 24 hours ever, I said that while waiting for the air conditioner to be fixed, I made a cake. Well, I took pictures of said cake. I found the recipe/idea for this cake online a few weeks ago and wanted to try it out. I didn't really have a reason to make a four-layer cake, but wanted to try it anyway. I figured it wouldn't hurt to go ahead and practice so that if I ever wanted to make it for a party or anything, I'd know if I could do it or not.
Nothing about this cake is from scratch. It's two straight-from-the-box cakes: a white one and a red velvet one. Besides the ingredients the cake mix calls for (eggs, oil, water), the only other things needed were strawberries and cool whip.
I baked my cakes using two 8-inch pans. I did the red velvet first, rinsed the pans, and then did the white cake.
While the cakes cooled, I chopped up a whole bunch of strawberries.
Then all I had to do was build the cake. First, a red velvet layer topped with cool whip and strawberries.
White cake layer came next, topped with more cool whip and strawberries.
Back to red velvet.
And finally, the last white cake on top.
Up to this point, everything about this had been easy-breezy and I was smooth sailing. But it was time for the tricky part. Following the directions from online, I cut my template out of a piece of cardstock.
I covered the sides of the cake in what I thought was a thick layer of cool whip. Turns out I didn't get it thick enough because my template scraped down to the cake. Live and learn, I guess. No pictures of the process since all hands were involved (mine using the scraper, Doc's to rotate the cake stand), but I placed the template up to the edge of the cake and rotated the cake stand, allowing the template to scrape the cool whip into a scallop edge and knock off the excess. (Make sense? She explains it better.)
Not nearly as pretty as my inspiration, but not too bad for a first try, right?
We had dinner with our friends Sarah and Charlie that night, and then invited them back to our house for dessert. I was excited to cut into it.
The final verdict? Pretty tasty. Since it's lots of cool whip instead of icing, it was nice and light. The strawberries gave it a good summery taste. As Sarah suggested, it would make a great 4th of July cake - you could even dye the white cake blue! Maybe I'll give it a try...