Something different & new for me to do!

Ok so I usually bake cookies for family & friends in December which I’ve been doing. I got an email order request from a bride for a December wedding cake, sure that’s not really new, but what her request is! I’ve been doing research, ordered the ingredients that I didn’t have on hand for her cake. She’s asked for a Red Velvet small two tiered cake, naked. What is a naked cake you ask? The naked cake is a cake style that omits the majority of frosting you would typically see on the exterior of a cake. Cake layers are baked and stacked with plenty of filling to add flavor and moisture to the cake and served without an outer layer of frosting. Such as the one she used to show as an example for me to reference with:

The Bride’s naked cake example she provided.

In this picture there are sugared berries. This is considered an off season fruit so the prices for fresh berries are certainly a bit higher. I have wanted to try this, so I did my research and found a really good recipe/technique on making these sugared berries. I ordered from Amazon the super fine sugar known as caster sugar. 

There are so many types of sugar in the world that if you don’t research the kind you will need to coat the berries with, it might not work as well as you wanted. The kind of sugar that I needed for this particular cake is caster sugar. What is caster sugar? The Food Network has a great explaination of this kind of sugar. In summary it’s between granulated sugar and confectioner’s sugar (also known as icing sugar). I am excited and a bit nervous to make this cake as successful as I can. 

The bride will be picking the cake up the day it’s needed, so I will need to make sure that the berries stay where I place them. Everything will be edible on the cake. I have been using a system called Stable Mable that is created by Certified Master Sugar Artist, Barbara Evans.  Owner of the Wedding Cake Connection. Since 2015 I’ve been using this system for all my tiered cakes. 

This Red Velvet naked cake will not be any different. The only thing different from all other naked cakes will be the berries and where I placed them.

Here it is! I loved making this cake! Not exactly as I had wanted, but with the weather and the technique I used it wasn’t too hard. I hope to make another one! I hope you all can see there’s imperfections, but I’m my own worst critic. Red Velvet is chocolate that has red food coloring in it to give that vibrant color, naturally chocolate is very moist, so it crumbles a lot. I haven’t figured out the best way to make this cake flavor without it crumbling. Until then, I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing, making cakes for you!