Pink Velvet Cake

For Easter, I made The Pioneer Woman's Red Velvet Cake, except I didn't have red food coloring so I used pink instead and told everyone I did this because it was Easter, not Christmas. Sounds good, right?

Until this venture, I had never made a layer cake before. Not one, ever. Not even from a box. Even my mother-in-law and the hubby were shocked at this. The hubby said I was like one of those star chefs who end up on a cooking competition and then go, "Oh, wait, I have to know how to boil water? I've never done that before." But it's true. Layer cakes have always intimidated me because there are so many stages at which the whole thing can go wrong. In her post about Red Velvet Sheet Cake, PW says she prefers the simplicity of sheet cakes because they're easier. However, she also hosts at home usually, I believe. I never do, so my desserts always need to be transportable and I don't see a sheet cake as being highly transportable (especially when you're also juggling a diaper bag and proto-toddler).

Things about layer cake that intimidate me:

-cooking the actual layers

-stacking the layers

-trimming the layers

-frosting the layers

-running out of frosting

I worry too much, in general, but I learned something valuable from this experiment: frosting covers a million sins. (Except when you eat a lot of it. Then you probably end up with cellulite.)

So PW's recipe calls for 10 inch pans and I only had 9 inch, so I baked them an additional 4 minutes until they seemed done (toothpick came out clean). After letting them fully cool, I did the initial middle icing and then stacked them.

And then I decided to get all fancy-pants and try to trim the layers so as to make a nice, perfectly round cake. What I ended up with was 3/4 round (untouched because I gave up) and one squared off side, like it was trying to start an octogon cake. I gave up on trimming and resigned myself to filling in the missing cake segment with icing. It worked, too.

Or at least everyone was nice enough to not saying anything to me about how I patched cake with frosting. I also forgot to put the vanilla extract in the icing. Oops. But I don't think that mattered too much.

I think the cake came out a little dry, which is a pattern I'm noticing with PW's recipes - well, or with my execution of them, probably. (And boy did I execute this cake, ha! Ba-dum-dum, I'll be here all week.)

For anything of hers I make that's flour-based (breads, cakes, etc), I find them to be a bit dry as well as a bit bland. (I'm thinking particularly of her cornbread, which I don't think I'd make again, truthfully.)

I don't know how many recipes I have left to complete in her book, but I know there are still several flour-based ones, so we'll have to see how those go. This cake was passable, but not the best I've had or the best I've made. I have another layer cake to make this Friday, so I'm glad I had this practice. Onwards and upwards!

This post is another in a series where I attempt to make every recipe in The Pioneer Woman's cookbook.  You can click on "Pioneer Woman" in my tags to read the other attempts.