Wedding Cake / Groom's Cake Tasting Project

I received a call from a bride-to-be that she'd gotten my name from someone and heard great things about my cakes. Yea! She and her fiance wanted to come by for a tasting. Awesome! She wanted to keep things simple and taste a vanilla and an almond wedding cake with buttercream icing. Wonderful! So I baked and baked and even made an amaretto cake as well, just for some variety. They came and tasted. Success! They both liked the cakes and after choosing the almond cake and thinking it over, hired me!

That evening she called back to see if we could do a tasting for a groom's cake as well the following weekend. Yippee! German Chocolate with chocolate buttercream icing. Oh but wait, can we taste the wedding cake again with a lemon filling? Oh and can you make the wedding cake denser and not so light and fluffy?? Well sure, I'm up for the challenge!! So I made my ingredient list and headed out to the supply store.

The next day I started baking. Lemon filling, check. Chocolate buttercream icing, check. German chocolate cake, check. Dense vanilla and almond cake......no check. We are having a snow storm and just when I was going to get these cakes ready to bake, we lost power! I waited about an hour keeping myself busy thinking surely it will come back on and praying my ingredients didn't spoil in the fridge. Finally I called the power company and they said it wouldn't be on until 4pm at the earliest. It was 1:30!

Thankfully my in-laws live right around the corner, and still had power, so I packed everything up in a big box and headed over to use their kitchen to finish the task. I barely made it out of my driveway and had to try a couple of times to get into theirs due to the slippery snow and ice, but I made it.

Now I've never made a dense cake before so I'd researched how to do this online and found a few great tips. Well, let's just say they didn't really turn out so well. The first one was more like a cheesecake and the second, well it tasted like a shortbread cookie! Tired and frustrated, by 6pm I decided to stop for the day. Our power finally came back on at 9:30pm and we headed home for the night.
The next morning I got up early and checked out the snow outside, a foot to be exact. SO beautiful. I got online again for more research and found a few more tips. Braving the freezing cold, snow and ice my wonderful hubby drove me to the store (after a drive through the neighborhood to check out snowmen and the damage the snow caused) to get what I needed and I began again.

Three attempts later, eureka, it worked! A dense cake that actually tasted good. I felt like I'd accomplished something grand! It was quite the process figuring out this dense cake but I'm thankful for the opportunity to learn something new.
So the next morning they came, they tasted and they liked it! There was a nice moment watching their faces light up as they tasted and enjoyed what I'd made. Now I get to make their wedding and groom's cake! I'm so excited, it's gonna be lots of fun!