My 28th birthday was magical…
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One of the many magical events of my birthday weekend was having our two favorite couple friends over to celebrate. For this event, I felt it only fitting to make Alison’s Celebration Cake: a three-tiered yellow cake with chocolate/sour cream frosting and rainbow sprinkles. And yes, I did convert it to a Gluten-free recipe! Tips for doing so are below.
I’ll admit that I’ve never considered myself a baker. Baking is fussy and requires precision. People say baking is pure science, and since I am historically terrible at that subject, I assumed I’d fail at baking, too. I used to tell people that I was capable of messing up a box of brownie mix. (Which is true, I’ve done so more than once.) I’m working on my baking confidence though. I received a Kitchen Aid mixer as a wedding gift, and you can’t have one of those giant, heavy machines and not attempt to use it. This project alone requires me to bake at least 30 times. But a three-tiered cake -- now, that made me nervous. I went down a dark mental road and imagined it toppling over several times. Which turned this into a moment when I had to test my theory that good things happen when passion and risk join forces. So without further ado… cake.
First step was to make all three tiers of the yellow cake and let them cool completely. I won’t bore you with the steps of making the cake batter, but I will tell you how I made it GF. Using the steps below, I truly could not tell what the difference would be between my GF version and the real deal. Similar to the method I used for the Lemony Turmeric Tea Cake, I:
Swapped regular All-Purpose flour with Gluten-free All-Purpose flour, using a 1:1 ratio
Added 1.5 tsp. of Xanthum gum (½ tsp. per cup of flour)
Used 2 additional eggs: 7 whole eggs instead of just 5 eggs, in addition to 3 egg yolks
I used my scale to distribute the batter evenly between the cake pans as best I could. The cakes bake for about 40 minutes, swapping two of the pans halfway through so that each one has some time on the top rack. Once they are golden brown and pulling away from the sides, they can rest on a rack to cool completely.
The frosting is made of only 5 ingredients: 12 oz. melted bittersweet chocolate, 2 sticks of butter, powdered sugar, sour cream, and a dash of salt. Whip them together until they’re impossibly fluffy, and you’ll have frosting that looks and feels like it came straight from a canister. I’ll admit that this frosting is VERY rich. Delicious, but perhaps slightly too much for me. And for some reason, it tasted more mellow on the second and third days.
Assembling and frosting the cake was the part I was most nervous about. However, Alison provides a guide on “How to Casually Frost a Cake,” which basically encourages playing fun music, sipping rosé and acting like the whole affair is purely a fun activity. Which in hindsight seems like a no brainer. But I do struggle with taking myself too seriously, so this was a welcomed reminder.
I learned about a crumb layer through this recipe. It’s essentially the first layer of frosting applied to a cake. You know the time you frosted a cake as a kid and it felt like you were just smearing loose crumbs all over the surface with the frosting? A crumb layer allows for that to happen, because you can refrigerate the cake after the crumb layer, allowing the cake to settle and firm up before applying the second, and more decadent layer of frosting -- the layer that won’t have any crumbs. (However, I didn’t have any problems with crumbs in either layer, which I think is due to how thoroughly my cakes had cooled by this point.)
The last step was to apply copious amounts of rainbow sprinkles. For the sides, I basically had to toss sprinkles at them like confetti and pray that they stuck. Which means that these sprinkles went E-VER-Y-WHERE. At one point, Jordan had the brilliant idea of moving the whole operation to our balcony. We stood in the cold wind and chucked double-fisted handfuls of sprinkles at the cake like all-star pitchers.
I may still be vacuuming up sprinkles from my carpet one week later, but this cake was totally worth it. The awe-factor of cutting into it and seeing those three straight layers of cake emerge was super satisfying. Like I said, the cake and frosting were rich, but boy were they delicious.
49 recipes cooked, 176 to go.
