Warning, you will only be able to eat a small piece of this decadent toffee cake with dates. I find the combination of sweet dates with sticky toffee sauce so endearing. This is rich, this is soulfood. The cake layers are sweetened with dates, the buttercream contains toffee sauce and of course the whole cake needs to be soaked in toffee sauce. I decided to sprinkle this cake with a little bit of coarse salt to cut the sweetness a bit. This is a prefect cake for a gloomy November day or any day that needs some comfort food.
This is going to be a slightly different coffee date to the previous ones. I decided to show you a few pictures of the second wedding cake I had the honor of making in August this year. I will try to keep it short, but I will let you know the few lessons I learned along the way. If you are interested in the recipes, please check this blog post. For more details on the process, check out my highlights on Instagram.
Lesson #1: A three-tiered cake requires much more work than a two-tiered cake. For that reason I made the cake layers at home in Munich and decided to freeze them. As you can see, I wrapped them tightly in plastic wrap and also used a plastic bag to keep them fresh. I decided to do this as the wedding was 600km away and I was simply too scared to carry a cake long-distance for such a long amount of time. I am glad I went this route, I ended up 7 1/2 hours on the road.
You can see that I wrapped the cake layers in plastic wrap and a bag in order to freeze them
Lesson #2: Cooling boxes are my new favorite toy. I carried the frozen cake layers for 7 1/2 hours in this box, wrapped in ice and it was not problem at all to continue freezing the cake layers in a freezer. Yes!
Yes, it used a seatbelt for the box
Lesson #3: I finished the wedding cake in an Airbnb. Obviously, I carried with me a lot of the tools, including my KitchenAid. But it was very convenient to have an empty fridge for the cakes at hand.
You will see the three cake layers in the semi-naked style here
Lesson #4: Unfortunately, larger cakes tend to look smaller and bulkier than they actually are. I made 4 cake layers for the top tiers, but decided to use five cake layers (as you can see below) for the bottom tier. Reason for this being that the bottom layer somehow looked smaller otherwise. This is something you should keep in mind when you calculate your sizes, I had to add one extra layer to my bottom tier!
You see that the bottom tier of 30xm had five cake layers to get it to look a bit taller
Lesson #5: If the bride tears up when she sees the cake, I feel you have done a good job. And let me tell you, making a three-tiered cake requires a lot of work. I think I spent about 20 hours on this cake, let alone the many hours I did research, tried different cake recipes, checked many flavors, etc. Many of the guests came to me thanking me that this was the first wedding cake ever tasting fresh and fruity and was not so overly sweet. Of course each layer had a different flavor combo and as requested by the couple, I had used very little buttercream, but cream cheese, etc. for the filling. Below you can see how popular the wedding cake was, coffee time was not over yet when I snapped that picture.
I snapped this picture during coffee time, I think barely anything was left
If you are interested in further details or would like to know the recipes, feel free to leave me a comment. Update: I finally gave in and posted the recipes for the three-tiered wedding cake here. Also, I did do a whole series on the first wedding cake I made, you can check it out here:
Part I How to bake a wedding cake at home
Part II How to schedule a plan when making a wedding cake at home
Shame on me, I haven’t drunk a virtual coffee with you in such a long time. It is already the last quarter of 2020 and here I am, no coffee date as of yet. Shame on me. The only excuse I have is that due to the Corona virus my full-time job changed quite a bit with an extremely busy workload. But regardless, I should have taken the time to tell you a bit, shouldn’t I?