The Cake(s)

I spent a decent amount of time trying to come up with an idea for Cade's first birthday bash. I found a few different ideas, but nothing that was really screaming to me that it was THE idea. Then I saw Bakerella's blog for Valentine's Day. She did a fourteen-layer cake for the fourteenth and it hit me that doing a twelve-layer cake (one for each month of Cade's life) was just the idea I was looking for.

Normally making the cake myself is a big savings from custom bakery cakes; however, I definitely did not save money by home-baking this time. The canned frosting was a pretty big expense (3 colors at approximately $3.50 per can, plus $1.50 each for 2 tubs of buttercream frosting) not to mention the ingredients for the frosting in between the layers, the cake mixes themselves, the cake pans, etc.

Here is a picture to prove I actually did bake each of the twelve layers separately. I washed, dried, buttered, parchment papered, re-buttered, and floured each pan. That was fairly time consuming.

I used two cake mixes for the twelve layers and the "smash cake".

When the first four cakes came out of the oven perfectly done and popped easily out of the pans I was thinking how cool I was and did some crazy move with my camera, the battery compartment popped open, and a battery flew into the batter of one of the small cake pans. Thankfully I had just enough batter left to replace the battery batter.

I am famous for burning the last tray of cookies so I did a huge happy dance when the last cakes came out and I didn't burn any of them!

I finished baking all the layers just in time to put the boys to bed and head back to the kitchen for the chocolate "glue" for the layers. Here are all the healthy ingredients for the chocolate syrup/frosting:

I started with a layer of cake and poured on a layer of syrupy frosting, layer of cake, layer of syrupy frosting, until I had all twelve layers. After I began stacking them I realized the importance of the step which had told me to spread the batter as evenly as possible. I had not spent much, if any, time attempting to get the batter level because I thought it would level itself while baking. Yeah, not so much. If I do it again I will definitely attempt to get the batter more level.

It took a lot of buttercream frosting to cover this cake!

Final product!

The smash cake had issues of it's own. I thought I was cutting the tops off evenly, but apparently not.
Cade's "smash cake" took an awful lot of frosting too.
He was ready to go!