A Wedding Cake?!

I think I may have offered to bake someone's wedding cake today. Well, I know I offered to. But I was joking. Except the offer wasn't taken as a joke; it was taken as an offer. I guess that's a danger when you decide you're going to bake a cake a week for a whole year.

The other day when I was talking about cakes - which I have done a lot lately - my son exclaimed, "Why is it cakes, cakes, cakes? What about cookies? What about cupcakes?" He wasn't really looking for an answer - he probably already knows. Around the time of my 41st birthday I was contemplating the fact that it's hard to learn how to bake a new cake. I have a five-cake repertoire: a vegan chocolate cake, my regular chocolate cake (with beets), a German chocolate cake, a white cake and a cranberry almond coffee cake. The problem is that if you're baking a cake for an occasion, you can try out a new recipe. You need to make a cake that you know will turn out well. And when I'm baking for fun, I tend not to make a whole cake. I may make cookies, or more likely, muffins.

So, I decided to make a new cake to take to an office party. I'd read a recipe in a cookbook I had checked out of the library: The Naptime Chef. The author had begun as a blogger, and she described this Mexican Chocolate Cake with Cinnamon Butter Frosting as the cake she makes for birthdays. It turned out okay - I found the cinnamon frosting too strong (although many of my colleagues seemed to really like it) and over the next couple of weeks I decided that if I was going to expand my cake baking skills, I should jump in with both feet. I thus challenged myself to make a new cake recipe, one each week, for a year.

The subject of my challenge quickly became the topic of many conversations because, while I want to learn to bake new cakes, and I certainly want to eat some cake, I've realized that a sub-challenge is to make 52 cakes without gaining 52 pounds. Consequently I've been giving a lot of cake away. I bought a bunch of those lightweight reusable plastic containers and each cake gets baked, served, and then cut into pieces to give to coworkers, friends, and my mom.

Over the last five weeks, I've made five cakes, plus a couple of cakes I already knew how to make. At this moment, I have two unfrosted cakes in the freezer, a situation which I could never have imagined two months ago.

I've checked a bunch of cake cookbooks out from the library - returned some, renewed others. I've been loaned a copy of The Cake Bible. And I've read and re-read a couple of the cookbooks from my shelves. 

I've bought a glass cake stand (with cover) and have filled my amazon.com wishlist with an obscene number of cake-making items, which I imagine I will slowly buy for myself.

I'll post the recipes I try out here, plus pictures, and let you know what I'm learning.