Decadent Housewife Bakes a Wedding Cheesecake

Ta Da! See what Decadent Housewife made? This was for Saucey Chef. A precarious thing to do, I suppose - me baking a wedding cake for a real chef. Saucey married in Australia and this was the later Canadian celebration. Well, Saucey is a gracious lady (I also didn't tell her.) I didn't really think anything could go too too wrong. I mean, how hard, can it be? Bake a cake, stack it, stick some roses in the top. Done. But then, we saw what happened to the prom vest. Well, I overheard the owner of the tearoom ask Saucey where she had gotten her cake and everyone said they really enjoyed it. Ta Da!
It's the first stacked cheesecake I've done. Actually, my first stacked any cake. If I can do it, so can you. I've made single layers before and depending on the weather, I did or did not pipe a lovely shell pattern around the perimeter using the White Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting recipe. This cake was made on an unusually hot day in spring. I could see that the icing would not pipe without chilling right down and I didn't have time for that. I still had to do flowers for the cake top and corsages and boutonnieres.
The caketop is a dozen roses, some red, white and a single pink. I nicked off the stems leaving the bump below the calyx and a bit of stem. A wire was pushed through the bulbous part of the stem and then both wire ends pulled down together forming the new "stem." I then wrapped the wire with floral tape and then floral taped all the stems together. The little bouquet was then stuck into a holder made specifically for such a purpose.
For those in Canada, I found the cake flower holder, cardboard cake rounds, wooden dowels and pretty lace doily all at a Bulk Food store. The wire came out of GG's Shop From Hell and I had the floral tape but both can be purchased from any florist. Measure the height you want the dowels and score and cut with a very sharp knife. Then smooth off the cut ends by pushing them around a bit onto a hard surface. Most people would use little pillars or wineglasses to hide the dowels and stack the cake but I didn't want anymore of the cake and berries disturbed than necessary so I simply sunk the five dowels into the cake positioning them to support the top layer between the berries. Then I covered the exposed part of the dowels between the layers with a bit of wired ribbon. Easy.The cake recipe for this is each of my Daily Decadent Cheesecake and White Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting recipes doubled. I wasn't sure how much batter I'd end up with and therefore planned to keep the cake batter about an inch from the pan tops. Had there been more batter than that, I was prepared to leave it off. As it was, it worked out perfectly. However, much to the pleasure of the wolves, there was about two cups of icing left over.
I should have used a bain marie - a water bath wherein the pans are set into another pan containing hot water going up the cake pan sides no further than two or three inches. But I'd loaned out my pan to One Old Man. You can see that the cakes were browned and rose up looking wonky and beneath the icing of the large cake is a huge crack. It didn't much matter because I was frosting them anyway. However, a bain marie will eliminate the uneven cake top, browning, cracking and souffle head.Last week I baked two more single layer cakes, one for Roll Kuchen's bridal shower and one for Father's Day. I used a heavy stainless steel frypan for the hot water bath. It looked goofy but worked. For the bridal shower I used a ten-inch cake pan which made a more shallow cake but I wanted it to serve more people. For the Father's Day cake - the photo you see above - I used an 8-inch pan and the cake was taller and the wolves howled with delight. You can also see the difference in using White Chocolate Frosting which has been made the day before, completely cooled down and then allowed to come back to room temperature. It really spreads on well and thick.For Saucey's Canadian wedding cake, with the batter doubled, I used 10-inch and 6 inch pans and the cake was tall and looked substantial when sliced. While the wedding cake took a double batch of frosting with some left over, a single batch of the White Chocolate Frosting was exactly enough to cover both the 10 and 8 inch cakes I made this past week.

The bake times for all these pan sizes was 350 F for 50 minutes then the oven shut off and the cake left to sit in there for an hour. After that remove the cake, cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate. Be careful if you cover it with aluminum foil since if the foil touches the cake top the acids in the food, will eat through the foil. Icky boo big time.Once frosted, cover with preserves. I pushed pure blueberry preserves through a strainer. Then covered with some fresh blueberries. Any fruit would do. For Roll Kuchen's bridal shower and GG's Father's Day cake I increased the lemon in the batter to a whole lemon rather than just the half called for in my recipe. I did this mostly because I didn't want a half lemon hanging around in the fridge. The cakes tasted great and there was no change in texture or consistency.
The wedding cake rode unstacked, to the tearoom. Decadent sat in the backseat of Fun's smarty pants old guy's car juggling the cake dish with the bottom layer and shifting around the box holding the flowers, every time Fun turned into the noonday sun. Fun's BFF sat in the front seat holding the cake top layer likewise dodging the sun, lest the icing begin to melt. I used double sided tape to make sure the carboard disc didn't shift around on the glass cake dish. A sensible mini-van would have been better for the transportation part. But since they were all being occupied either at the auto-mechanic's or transporting people, you take what you can get. I imagine things like this probably never happen to Martha Stewart. Ever.

Upon arriving at the tearoom, I plunked the rose bouquet into the top layer and Fun's BFF and I ran into the tearoom carrying the cakes and assembled them easily on the main table. The bottom layer served 22 people and Saucey Chef and her beloved got to take the top layer home for themselves. I would do it again, only, I'd make the icing a few days earlier and maybe skip doing all the flowers.