Cakes

This past Saturday (7/7/07) I attended a coworkers wedding and was dubbed "Official Cake Baker" - and I have the lei to prove it! That' s right, I made my first official wedding cake, and all cheesecake nonetheless!

She first asked me to make her wedding cake last fall. Since I had never really attemped one before, I told her I needed to do a few practice cakes first. I started with a two tiered Frakenstein cake for our office halloween party. The top layer was a cinnamon white cake with apple cinnamon filling, and the bottom was chocolate hazelnut with chocolate ganache filling. Both topped off with my cream cheese frosting.

After seeing that cake, another coworker asked me to make a Mini Mouse cake for her daughter's 3rd birthday. By this time I was up for the challenge! Apparently the chocolate hazelnut cake was a hit because she requested that for the bottom tier. The other two were white cake and chocolate cake with a traditional cream filling. Again - finished off with my cream cheese frosting.By this point I was all ready to do a wedding cake! But then, as we were talking one day at work about the wonders of cheescake, it was decided that is what I would make (instead of the previously requested plain white cake). Now not only is cheesecake my favorite desert, but it is also my favorite thing to make. I've spent the last few years experimenting with different cheesecake recipes and flavor combinations in order to perfect the art of cheesecake making. Now that I have my recipe downpat, I love to play around with different flavors and get creative (key lime, creme brule, carmel apple, etc). After sampling some of my creations, I actually have people offering to pay me for these suckers now! And yes, I am currently taking orders! :)
Anyway, back to the wedding cake. She wanted plain, which is easy enough. But I have never done a 3 tiered cheesecake! So, I turned to Wilton, opting to use their wedding cheesecake recipe, instead of my own (I wasn't too sure how my recipe would stand up as a wedding cake). Having never been much of one to follow a recipe - I followed this one to a T. Well, the folks at wilton haven't let me down yet. It turned out perfectly (despite my many anxiety dreams of all the possible combinations of things that could go wrong). So normally, I would put my own recipe down here for cheesecake, but hey, I spent years on that sucker, I'm not ready to hand it out just yet.