The Results of Baking at Midnight: A Wedding Cake

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Last night at about 11.30PM, I was so frustrated with writing- or should I say not writing- my paper that I had this intense urge to de-stress in the kitchen. I wanted to make a cake. But not just any cake. I wanted to use equipment I had hardly handled before- fondant smoothers, imprint mats, edible glitter, egg white as glue, and most importantly: a tiered cake. OK a tiered cake isn't exactly equipment but you get what I mean.

And so I made a wedding cake.

Or what I hoped looked like one anyways.. although it was a little on the small side..

That's so typically me. Deciding to do something small and relatively trivial and ending up overdoing it. Like take the instance of me wanting to cook a dinner, not just everyday suppers, but a dinner that's slightly "formal" although only with family. No, I won't just make one starter, one main course, and one dessert. I will make 2 starters, 3 main courses, 2 desserts, and maybe 2 side dishes..

I happen to pile up so much (in any aspect of my life) that at times it exhausts me. But I enjoy it. It makes me feel fulfilled and accomplished. I guess we're all different. Some people like to take things nice and slow and others like to go on turbo speed.

Yes, that was my idea of a mini adventure.

And so I went buzzing around the kitchen and lining up ingredients that I wanted to use. Butter? Nah. Self-raising flour? Definitely. I came up with a recipe whose result surprised me. Not too sweet but just perfectly moist.

Ingredients
2 cups self raising flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup vegetable oil
1 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 cup skimmed milk
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/3 cup fresh raspberries

Procedure
Grease and lightly flour two cake tins: a 5 inch one and an 8 inch one.
Sift flour in bowl. Add salt. Beat together oil, sugar, and eggs. Add flour to oil mixture, alternating with milk and vanilla. Stir well. Add the raspberries and fold in. Bake at 160C for 30 minutes.

Once cake is done, roll out fondant onto a surface dusted with icing sugar. When you get the appropriate size needed to cover the entire cake, gently lift fondant and press onto cake. Trim off edges. Smoothen with your palms. Decorate as you like.

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It was my third time to use fondant. The first time I used it was when I placed it on top of a regular vanilla cake. I also cut out little flowers and colored them yellow for that cake.

The second time I made some cupcakes with a good friend and used fondant as icing. It was quite fun and we were extremely happy with the result.

I wasn't tooooo happy with the cake since it didn't look absolutely PRO. The fondant was dimpled thanks to my fingers and the ribbon was smudged with too much egg white. And I didn't trim the edges of the fondant as well as I would've liked to. But hey, practice practice practice.

The little pearls were a later idea of mine. I rolled little balls of fondant and then sprinkled some edible glitter on them and then stuck them on the cake using a little egg white.

And I got the fondant imprint right on the second try. The first time it The fondant wouldn't lift from the sheet. Perhaps because I placed the sheet on top of the fondant. Second time I tried it, after rolling up the same fondant, I placed the fondant over the mat. Then I lifted the mat and placed it (fondant side down) on the cake. OH, also remember to brush your cake with cooled boiled jam before applying fondant. :)