Baking and Decorating Cakes

I think I am a true Gemini, leading two lives. In another life, when I was working on my Engg. degree, I was baking cakes and desserts on the side. It started off as making cakes for family members and then I started getting orders for specialized cakes. I even started teaching how to bake cakes from my home in India. That was my creative outlet then and now it is pottery. Someday I will post pictures of the cakes I made then.

My wife, Reema has been pestering me to bake a fancy cake since we got married. I still do bake occasionally but never spent the time decorating as I used to. On our 5th year Anniversary she insisted on a 5 tier cake and I had to decline. That was 2 years back and the number of expected tiers was only increasing with every year. This year however she turned 30 and I wanted to make her a 3 tier cake (more managable).

So I did it all from scratch. The cake was a vanilla butter cake with chocolate chips. The cakes were leveled and have a chocolate fudge layered icing. Then covered with butter cream icing for the fondant.
The fondant was made from scratch as well and I had forgotten what a mess it can be. Fun none the less.
The invidual cakes were covered, stacked, and decorated further. The roses on top took a lot more time than I expected (2.5 hours for 4 roses).

The cake took a little less than 30 hours... a lot longer than it would have taken me some years back. At the end of it, we had a fun time and it was a pleasure making that cake. Happy Birthday!