Twilight Cake

So, I wanted to make a cake that wouldn't be like your traditional Twilight cake...Most of them took the themes that were on the front of the books and played up on them. I decided to take one of my favorite scenes and recreate it.

In the last book, they go on their honeymoon and the morning after their first night there, they wake up surrounded by feathers. This cake is a tribute to that moment. The cake is red velvet filled with white chocolate cream cheese frosting and fondant on the outside.

My learnings for this cake:
-Never put fondant in the fridge. It has a tendency to sweat and makes everything slippery

-I LOVE the white chocolate cream cheese frosting recipe from Levibaum's book, but it doesn't pipe very well in the heat (http://www.recipezaar.com/White-Chocolate-Cream-Cheese-Frosting-18360)

-As always, less is more. I started out with a ton of red dots circling the bottom and top of the cake and, since I had to remove the sides due to the fondant and frosting oozing downward on me over night, I redid the frosting with red flowers here and there and it was much better.

- You can make a checkerboard pattern and then use it on the side of the cake without backing. I didn't have enough fondant to make a backing, but it didn't end up mattering. I just used my trusting silicone mat and a piece of a flexible plastic cutting board to lay it onto the side.

-You cannot make royal icing with a Magic Bullet. It does nearly everything else, but I don't think it incorporates enough air...I still wonder if my immersion blender might work. The reason I struggle is I never need too much royal icing, but my stand mixer is a 6 cup mixer and a little big for such a small job.

- Floral wire is AWESOME!! I twisted two strands together to make each part of the canopy and then I coated them with fondant and it worked perfectly.

-I love Paula Deen's Red Velvet cake recipe, but I need to be careful with my shortcut for buttermilk. It calls for buttermilk and I usually just use the shortcut of making it by using milk and vinegar from my Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. Well, I put the milk in the microwave to get it to room temp and then added the vinegar and the milk curdled the milk almsot too much so I had globa in the buttermilk. I don't know if I would need to make the buttermilk first and then nuke it or maybe I just used too much vinegar. Maybe it's time to start measuring on this one. Or just let the milk cook back down a tad. Either way, you could see the milk curdles in the texture of the cake - yuck.

Overall, it was a blast to make this cake ; )