Square Tiered Cakes

The next cake I did was for a good friend of mine at work. Her birthday was Friday so I had to make her a cake!

 Another of the "fancy" framing, ha.

 This shot make it look a lot lighter than it was.

I finally got to use my stencils that I got for Christmas!! I love 'em. I practiced (above) on an old cake dummy. (Btw, that's the brighter version of the burgundy royal icing I was talking about in the previous post.

Much brighter.

 After I would stencil the cake, I had to get the excess icing of the stencil. So I just did it on my countertop and there were pretty designs everywhere!!

It was some new decorations for a few hours :)

Stenciling is SO easy (don't tell though... I really worked very very hard on it ;) This was the first time I had ever done stenciling so I can't speak for all stencils, but this one was easy. I am very pleased with how this turned out. It wasn't perfect and I learned a few things such as 

    (1) I needed to really keep that stencil flush with the cake. Obviously I knew this but apparently I would slack every now and then because purple got mixed in with the design. I'm assuming that was the problem. 

    (2) Make sure the stencil you want to use fits the on the cake. I hadn't decided which stencil I wanted to use, but it's a good thing I had flexibility with this cake. One of the stencils was too tall for the cake. Oops. You can tell the top layer was a little too short. The stencil kind of went on top of the cake.

I feel like I will forever more be trying to make a clean buttercream cake. Clean edges, etc. I will say that I was impressed with how fast I did this cake. Iced, decorated, and stacked in roughly 2 hours. That might be pitiful depending who is reading this, but I take such a long time when decorating cakes. I've got to learn to pick up my pace. And it really stinks when I take so long attempting to perfect the buttercream and it doesn't even look like I tried. Eh, I suppose it's a working progress. 

{Btw, this cake was chocolate, the one I was explaining I was having such a hard time with sticking to the pan here. I had to re-bake some and I think doubling the recipe was part of the reason. Also, it seems like it's so moist that it kinda suctions to the pan. Umm... is that possible?? I have plans to try another recipe; although, I like this cake! I'll keep working on it and hopefully will come up with a solution.}

Speaking of buttercream cakes, here's the last one of the weekend. This was for a couple getting re-married so it was a small wedding, close family and friends.

 Not sure how long I worked on the buttercream, the smoothness, the edges, but ugh. Not quite there yet.

 Only on my blog do I show pictures like this. Look at that bottom vertical edge. Yikes. And the corner on the top layer is MIA. 

 Here it is completed with the gumpaste/fondant topper.

 I was fully prepared to run to Hobby Lobby with my 40% off coupon and buy a topper for when this one failed. But fortunately it worked!! I put wires in it (as you can see... but it has to have support!). This is something else I could use some "how-to" tips.

Overall, it was what they asked for and they liked it. That's always a good thing!