#tad cake

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Cake inspired by the cover of The Horror and the Wild. (It's a devil's food cake.)

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🤞🏻

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Colour tests

The colour selection at the cake decorating store was overwhelming:

I bought cheap Chefmaster black instead of the very pricy Colour Mill. When I left the store I was kicking myself for spending so much money on the Colour Mill blues, but now I kind of wish I had bought the Colour Mill black as well, because the Chefmaster tastes TERRIBLE and just makes the colour muddy. No big deal, because I think I can get the colours I want without it.

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TAD cake update:

My cream cheese frosting recipe is super tasty, but too soft to work with at room temperature. And doesn't really set much when cold. Not sure how to make it stiffer without adding more butter and/or icing sugar, both of which make it taste less good. Maybe corn starch?

Cream cheese frosting (enough to fill and crumb-coat a 9" 2-layer cake):

one 250g brick of cream cheese

1/4 cup butter

1 tsp vanilla

1 cup icing sugar

Yolanda Gampp's ganache (I don't recommend: it's lumpy) was nice and soft in the bowl at room temperature, but started to set when I put it on the cold cake, which made it hard to work with (although it can be fun if you want to carve shapes into your cake).

My buttercream recipe makes 5 cups of frosting.

Buttercream:

2/3 cup Crisco

2/3 cup butter

2 tsp vanilla

4 cups icing sugar

cream to soften

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So far so good:

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Ready to bake

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I use the Fry's cocoa to dust the pans because it's no good for anything else.

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🎂 I'm not aware of there being a cake-decorating community on Tumblr, but do any of you know how to calculate how much frosting you need to crumb-coat a cake? Not to fill it or frost the outside or decorate, just to do the crumb coat.

I'm going to crumb-coat a round 9" 2-layer cake with chocolate ganache to give myself a dark base to work with, and I'm trying to figure out how much ganache to make.

ETA: I've seen 1 cup and 1 1/2 cups, but with no indication what size cake they're talking about.

ETA2: OK, I found a blog that says you need about 1.5 cups to crumb-coat a round 8" 2-layer cake. So I just need to do some math to figure out how much I'd need for a 9" cake.

How tall is a 2-layer cake? I'm gonna go with 4". So the surface area of an 8" cake is

4" x 2π4" + π4"² = 100.53in² + 50.26in² = 150.78in²

So that's about 1.5 cups crumb coat/150 in² of cake. Which is, conveniently, 1/100 cup/in².

So, surface area of a 9" cake is:

4" x 2π4.5 + π4.5"² = 113.1in² + 63.62in² = 174.72in²

So that's basically 1 3/4 cups ganache to crumb-coat a 9" cake.

Should I make 2 cups just to be on the safe side?