Labor of Love

For the elderchild's birthday I wanted to make a cake out of my new book, Marbled, Swirled, and Layered which I had received from my sister. I gave the elderchild a choice of two recipes and the orange flavored Smith Island Cake was chosen. I've never made one before and, aside from it taking all morning, it wasn't too difficult.

First one has to make all the thin little layers. This would have gone faster if I had four 9-inch cake pans. Instead, I have two 9-inch cake pans and...two 8.5-inch cake pans. That would not do! So instead of baking four of the eight layers at once I had to bake two at a time and each baking and cooling cycle takes about 20 minutes. Also, the cake is a separated sponge so I used up basically every bowl and utensil I have, including the stand mixer.

The fudge frosting is basically ganache, and chills for an hour before frosting the cake. No crises occurred with the frosting part, thankfully.

Here's the finished cake, after we dug into it. It was perfect - not overly sweet, and the orange really stood out.