Audra, the cake description and your choice of recipes, are undoubtelly delicious.

You finished cakes looks perfect to me!

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Great Job Audra! isn't it the best part that it always tastes good? i fret over the decorations of each cake, because i'm sure it won't live up to the customer's standards, but i always remind myself that once everyone has tucked into the cake all they will remember is how fab it tasted!

Rose, your stories of cake misadventures are the best parts of your books! They serve to remind me that no one has it easy in the cake making department! I wish I could remember what made me pick up TCB and bring it home. the book has led me to an entirely new career and I don't even remember how it started!

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Audra, that is quite a story. You should be proud of yourself. The cake looks amazing! Rose mentions in the Cake Bible that only two people can be trusted to transport a cake - the person who baked it and the person who paid for it. Words to live by.

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Oh my! I am so humbled that this picture is on a site that I esteem so greatly! I have been so busy with work that I have not been back on in the past two weeks. I will be glad to send a higher resolution picture if I can, but for those of you asking about the cake details here goes:

The cake was the chocolate butter wedding cake with the addition of the extra butter (as the base formula directs). I moistened with a sugar syrup flavored with a raspberry liqueur (Chambord). I torted the layers and filled them with a raspberry jam that I made this summer (in the south when we do home canning we call it "putting up" jam/tomatoes/greenbeans, etc.). The cake was frosted with a white chocolate version of the mousseline buttercream...which I love in all its variations! After what seemed like hours of smoothing the sides, I then glazed the refrigerated tiers with with two coats of the Chocolate Cream glaze - corn syrup added for sheen and so the cake could be refrigerated later without cracking. Before the glaze fully set, I sort of held a strip of wax paper up half way on the cake to prevent any crumbs from going above the halfway point and "threw" some chocolate wafer crumbs at the cake which ended up looking really cool and not perfectly uniform. The glaze just did not allow for me to press the crumbs on as I could with adding nuts to the side of a buttercream frosted cake.

I did not intend to decorate the cake the way it ended up. It was supposed to be a tribute cake to my brother's college football team at Appalachian State. I had boxed all the tiers and entrusted the cake to my parents to transport it several hours away to the wedding site. When I arrived I was really under the gun...the groom's cake was to be the only dessert at the rehearsal dinner the night before the wedding. I was late after having gotten lost, I was caring for my 85 year old grandmother's trip to the wedding, I was to be the pianist for the ceremony, and I had thirty minutes to stack and finish decorating the cake before the rehearsal began! Whew! When I opened the boxes and saw that my Mom and Dad had let the cake be knocked around quite a bit, I told them it may have fared better if they had ridden with the cake on the hood of their car, which my family is all laughing about now, but I was serious at the time. Unless you baked it, you don't have a real stake in treating a cake like precious cargo I suppose. Well anyway I tried to patch up any "dings" in the glaze with some of the chocolate butter cream I brought to pipe around the base of the tiers. I arranged all the large holes in the icing in the back as I stacked the tiers. I did not have time to tie all the ribbons I had planned, and pipe App. State decor, so with three minutes to go I grabbed some of the flowers out of the arrangements on the dining tables (artificial flowers) and placed them on top of the cake to hide a nick or two in the icing, I piped one of the worlds fastest and most simple star borders along the bottom of every tier, and literally ran 100 yards to the ceremony site to jump on the piano bench and play for their wedding rehearsal.

But the cake was delicious, no matter what the outside looked like.
-Audra

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Congratulations Audra!!!! It looks absolutely delicious and I'm sure your brother will cherish the fact that you made his groom's cake :). Please share the details with us!

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Wonderful cake, Audra! It looks great, and I bet it was wonderful to eat. So inspiring.

Would love to hear details- which cake, frosting combination, what you used for decorations, etc.

Thanks for sharing,
Julie

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Beautiful cake Audra! Bravo! What did you use to decorate the bottom half of the cake? I couldn't quit make it out. Which cake and frosting recipes did you use? It looks delish! I'm sure your brother felt very special and loved with that cake.

I feel the same way you do every time I bake one of Rose's cakes too. I'm so grateful to her for her detailed explanations. Her cakes WOW everyone every time I make one. She has improved my baking/decorating skills ten fold. Thanks Rose!

I'm sitting on the edge of my seat waiting for the next cake book. :-) Thanks for including us in the process, Rose. I had no idea what an undertaking it was to create a cookbook. Your hard work is reflected in all of your books. I wish all cook book authors had your drive and perfectionism. Those little details make a lot of difference! It is so gratifying to have constant success when I use one of your recipes.

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