Extreme Sports

After drooling all over Bakerella’s website for days I decided on a variation of this  because I like a challenge and coincidentally am half insane. And that was before attempting this cake.

I had a chat to my bank manager about a second mortgage on our house (those alfoil pans are $4.00 bucks for three!) but he would only loan me enough to make a 9 layer cake, which in the end was just as well.

These are Willow Bake and Take containers. At that price they should  be called" Bake and Hand Down To Your Children as family heirlooms containers".  O.K I’ll stop whining now and move on.

I made a basic triple batch vanilla cake mix.  It took about 30 minutes to get all 9 cooked. So far so good. Nothing curdled, burned or fell on the floor in dog hair. I was contemplating stopping at this point because as far as I'm concerned that's success.

Yay ! First hurdle conquered. 9 perfect cakes.

Here is my assistant baker. Big on babbling advice in baby speak. Short on hands on work. He had to keep taking important calls on his pop up pets.

When I stacked 9 cakes one on top of the other I realised this was one BIG cake. My cakes were bigger than Bakerella’s.  I decided not to push my luck. 9 cakes this big in a stack is asking for trouble. Maybe my cakes rose a lot because we live above sea level Or I overfilled the pans. Whatever.

I went with 5 cakes with ganache between the layers and over the top. Yum!

And then I put chocolate cream cheese buttercream icing all over the outside.

This is what cake guts looks like

The verdict: We had cake for breakfast. Everyone made "mmmm" noises while eating.  It's lunchtime and nobody is dead yet. I'd say that's success.

P.S Baking is clearly an extreme sport- I broke a finger nail in the creation of this cake. Left index finger in case you're interested. Yeah I’m a whiny princess –deal with it.