Yellow Cake With Chocolate Frosting

My Very 1st Birthday Cake!!

Woo Hoo!  How exciting is this??  Yes, I have made many cakes, cookies, pies and cupcakes but I have never EVER made a birthday cake before!  For this little project I really wasn't all that concerned with the actual cake or icing, although, I am on a search for a good yellow cake/chocolate icing combo (not sure this one is it BUT it certainly wasn't bad).  This was really more about assembling a layer cake.  The cake recipe yields three 9 inch cakes so I decided to only make a double layer cake and use the last layer as practice.  After baking all three cakes I froze them so cutting them and crumb coating them would be easier.

After the cakes came out of the freezer, I leveled off the two layers for  the large cake and leveled off and cut 4 small rounds of of the last layer so I could practice my icing skills on 2 other (much smaller) cakes.

After I cut the cakes I brushed them with some vanilla simple syrup which I made by boiling the rest of my vanilla bean (from the vanilla wafer recipe) and a 1/2 cup sugar and a 1/2 cup water      just until the sugar is dissolved.  Adding the simple syrup to the cake is a good way to keep the layers moist. 

The next step is to add a small layer of icing to the top of one of the layers and to sandwich the next layer on top.  You do not need to spread the icing all the way to the side and it will kind of smush out when you add your next layer.

After you have your layers together, you want to crumb coat the cake which is where you add a thin layer of icing to seal the crumbs so you don't end up with crumbs in your finished product.

After you get your cake crumb coated, park the cake in the fridge and let the icing set up before adding the next layer of icing. 

When you pull your cake out of the fridge the thin layer of icing should be pretty set making it much easier to finish icing. 

This takes practice!  I had three cakes to practice on and my last one came out LOTS better than my first which was unfortunate since the 1st one I did was the actually b-day cake....oh well...

Here are the finished products...

This is the actual b-day cake (in case you didn't figure that out haha).  Instead of writing on the actual cake I melted white chocolate and wrote the text on some waxed paper with a piping bag.  I DO NOT have nerves of steel and was terrified that I would misspell something or royally mess it up so I took the whimpy way out.

And now for the WAY cuter mini layer cake...

If you guys really want the recipes I used for these cakes I will be glad to give them to you, they were just not my favorite and I'm feeling lazy and don't feel like writing them out (they were not that worth it).