Baking a Birthday Cake – By the Numbers

Kim Joy’s Lemon cake recipe from her book
The Spruce Eats Fluffy Homemade Vanilla Cake recipe

Ingredients for both cakes, Italian buttercream frosting (Kim Joy recipe), ruby chocolate ganache drips, and pink fondant donut topping: $63.75
– 13 sticks of Unsalted butter ($9.75)
– 1 box of caster baking sugar ($5.79)
– Self-Rising Flour ($4.49)
– All-Purpose White Flour ($2.49)
– Cream of tartar from our spice cabinet
– Baking Powder from our spice cabinet
– 15 large eggs ($3.49)
– 6 lemons ($4.99)
– 2 cartons of fresh raspberries ($10.98)
– Heavy cream from our fridge supplies
– Vanilla extract from our spice cabinet
– 4.4oz Pink fondant ($3.19)
– Gel-Based food color 12-count pack ($13)
– Almost 2 bars of ruby chocolate ($5.58)

Baking Supplies (not consumable) bought specially for this cake project: $29.47
– 7″ ring mold pan from Fat Daddio’s ($13.49)
– 7″ Round cheesecake pan from Fat Daddio’s ($11.99)
-11 Piece round cookie cutter set doughnut cutters ($3.99)

New Techniques that I’ve never done before/Lessons learned:

Making my own cake board using cardboard and tin foil
Making buttercream that isn’t just powdered sugar icing
Fixing the buttercream when it isn’t the correct texture
Using a Kitchen-Aid mixer
Weighing and Coloring the batter for even layers
Putting parchment paper in the baking pan after greasing the pan (and cutting out the circle to fit the pan)
Baking each layer separately because I only had one 9″ pan
Making a chocolate ganache
Using Ruby Chocolate
Creating ganache drips using a spoon and ganache at the correct temperature
Stacking the layers in a cake
Crumb coating a cake
Frosting a cake with a spatula and my grandparent’s turntable
Putting a second tier on top of a 5-layer cake bottom tier
Working with fondant
Cutting a cake that is 9.5″ tall and not dropping the top tier onto the floor when plating the slice