Cake # 56 Edgewood RED and WHITE Checkerboard Cake

A later post is better than no post at all and in addition to posting on a Monday, I also spent this weekend creating a cake and cupcakes for the EHS bake- off. My cake ended up winning third place! Monday and Tuesday of this week are in-service days for Harford County, and at last year's in-service we had a Chili cook-off and this year we decided to have round two of the Chili cook-off and add a bake-off. Ted competed in the Chili cook-off and made his own special Tiwana Chili with Tequelia, Lime juice, beer, bacon, beef, cumin, onion powder, peppers, red pepper, black pepper, salt, and onions. We all ate a practice round of Ted's chili for the Ravens game on Sunday - and for all the Baltimore fans out there - as Forrest Gump would say: "That's all I have to say about that."

My cake proved to be more disastrous (insert shock here) because I had attempted to do a marbled red and white fondant over the checkerboard three layer cake. I have made some really nice fondant cakes before, but never over a cake this high. Problem one: in attempting to make the bottom not ripple, I cracked the top of the cake. Problem two: Once fondant is cracked it's whacked. So, instead I opted for a traditional homemade butter-cream icing and had to ditch the fantastic marbled swirled fondant icing I had dyed. Note to self- take a class on fondant icing so it looks pretty for large cakes too! The cake was a checkerboard pattern (thanks to Ted's mom I was able to make it because I do not have the proper tools to make a checkerboard cake) of red velvet and a white cake- our EHS colors. The cake consisted of the standards: flour, sugar, baking soda, eggs, vanilla extract, and vegetable oil. It also had some twists to the cake as I choose to create a southern style recipe: cocoa powder, salt, buttermilk, and vinegar. Obviously, being red velvet cake, I added 2 table spoons of red food dye. The white cake consisted of butter, sugar, flour, baking powder, salt, egg whites, milk, and vanilla extract.

Here is my cake:

Because I had left over cake batter, and I never like to make things easy for myself, I also decided to make cupcakes as well. The cupcakes were white cake or red velvet cake with butter-cream icing, chocolate graham cracker "chalkboards" with white icing, a sugared school related candy, and a piece of chalk- made out of a cut - in - half white good - n- plenty. They were actually a lot of fun to decorate - though they did not receive any placing in the contest like my cake did.

Here were my cupcakes:  

Next week I will go back to the cakes in my cake-book. So for now, you only get the pictures of my cakes and my word that they tasted as good as they looked. But, hey, third place out of top five isn't too shabby!