Forgive a post that doesn’t even include a specific recipe and is more of a checklist (this low-traffic blog is partly just to keep notes-to-my-future-self on cooking, preserving, and food in general). I bake a cake about once every four years, which takes me a while as I try to remember what to prep ahead of time and how long various things need to cool. Here are my notes to stay organized from today’s two-layer cake:

Early prep (the night before):

  • Clean kitchen
  • Check ingredients (e.g. unsalted butter, enough sugar for cake + frosting, …)
  • If time, measure + prep dry ingredients for cake and frosting

First Round of Baking:

  • Preheat oven
  • Set butter for frosting on counter to come to room temp
  • Measure ingredients / mise en place
  • Prep cake pans (butter, parchment(?), wrap in damp fabric ‘cake strips’)
  • Make cakes according to recipe
  • Bake cakes
    • Set timer for ~half the time to rotate cakes and swap racks
    • Set timer for ~10min before nominal cook time to check doneness
  • While cakes are baking / cooling
    • Frosting prep depending on recipe (mise en place, and for some meringues start water simmering for double boiler)
    • Make frosting
    • Clean up everything (future me will be grateful)
  • Cool cakes in pans 10-20min, then flip onto wire racks
  • Once closer to room temp, plastic-wrap cakes and chill in fridge (~2 hours)

[ I take a break and do other stuff while the cakes cool ]

Assembly:

  • Once cakes are cool, remove from fridge, trim to flat
  • Place cake on cake board or metal sheet for handling
  • Apply a ‘crumb coat’– thin frosting coating all over to seal in crumbs
  • Cake back to fridge to chill this frosting layer (~15min seemed file for today’s buttercream)
  • Take cake out, final thicker frosting

And sure, I’ll include some process photos of the cake I just baked. It combined the excellent Violet Bakery Chocolate Devil’s Food Cake (made following the recipe, though I cooked it in two pans rather than one deep pan, and it was done baking at 40min– a toothpick came out not-quite-clean with a few crumbs attached), with a Swiss Merengue Buttercream frosting recipe from Sugarologie scaled up to 5 cups (which was barely enough for the cross-section and frosting thickness shown).

I was very happy with how this cake turned out– the moist chocolate, the texture and thickness of the frosting– I’d try something like this again.

Looking at my photos, total time was about five and a half hours (in my inefficient puttering-around way), though about two hours in the middle were downtime while I waited for cakes to cool– I fit in a batch of holiday cookies during that time but could have been doing other things (or could have made the cake one evening and assembled and frosted it the next day before serving).